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ESSAY 



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LORD CLIVE 



MACAULAY 



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MACAULAY'S ESSAY 



LORD CLIVE 



WITH AN HISTORICAL MAP, HISTORICAL NOTES, AND 
A SKETCH OF MACAULAY'S LIFE 






By D. H. M. 



3 9^V9 /. 



o>*;c 



BOSTON, U.S.A. 

PUBLISHED BY GINN & COMPANY 

1891 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1890, by 

GINN & COMPANY, 
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



All Rights Reserved. 



Typography by J. S. Cushing & Co., Boston, U.S.A. 



Presswork by Gjnn & Co., Boston, U.S.A. 



LORD MACAULAY. 



Thomas Babington Macaulay was born at Rothley Temple, 
Leicestershire, England, in 1800. He was the eldest son of 
Zachary Macaulay, the eminent philanthropist whose labors did 
so much toward securing the abolition of slavery in the British 
West Indies. 

Macaulay entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at eighteen. He 
was "gulfed" in his examination in mathematics, but distinguished 
himself in literary work. At twenty-six he was admitted to the 
bar ; but law was not his vocation, and meanwhile he had made 
himself famous in London society by his essay on Milton, contrib- 
uted to the Edinburgh Review in 1825. 

Zachary Macaulay had been a man of handsome property ; but 
while his son was in college he met with heavy losses. Instead of 
inheriting something of a fortune as he expected, young Macaulay 
found himself poor. Nothing daunted by the prospect, he set 
manfully to work not only to support himself, but to help lift the 
burden of debt from his father's shoulders. It was a hard strug- 
gle, and at one time he found himself so pinched for means that 
he was obliged to sell his Cambridge gold medals to get money 
enough to buy bread. 

In 1830 Macaulay entered Parliament. His speeches gained 
for him as much reputation as his essays. Gladstone, who sat 
with him in the Parliament of 1832, says that when it was known 
that Macaulay was " on his legs," there was a rush, and the empty 
benches of the House were soon filled with eager listeners. 

The brilliant young member for Calne was an ardent Whig, but 
in all things thoroughly independent. He was no politician ; he 
would not, nay, he could not, sell his soul for any mess of pecun- 



iv LORD M AC AULA Y. 

iary or popular pottage. Later, when Edinburgh declined to re- 
elect him because he had refused to sacrifice his convictions to 
the excited prejudices of his constituents, he wrote to those who 
had turned against him, " I shall always be proud to think that I 
once enjoyed your favor ; but permit me to say, I shall remember 
not less proudly how I risked and how I lost it." 

Undoubtedly this very positiveness of conviction and of asser- 
tion marked, in one way, a limitation of intellectual power. There 
were no degrees of light and shade in his mental horizon. Lord 
Melbourne once humorously hit off this defect by saying, '' I wish 
I were as cock-sure of any one thing as Macaulay is of everything." 

But perhaps the writer of the essays on Clive and Hastings had 
a better right than most men to feel " cock-sure " about what he 
knew. In his range of reading he seemed to grasp the substance 
of whole pages almost at a glance, and he apparently never forgot 
the minutest details of anything he thus stored up in his mar- 
vellous memory. Thus Macaulay devoured volumes by scores. 
While he was walking he was also reading ; and the story goes 
that on one stretch of sixteen miles — from Piccadilly, through 
Clapham to Greenwich — he went through with fourteen books of 
the " Odyssey." At the end of such a " constitutional," he prob- 
ably knew nothing of the streets and lanes he had passed through, 
but then only think how intimately he had become acquainted 
with the " much-contriving Ulysses." Out of these encyclopaedic 
stores of knowledge he wrote. It was no more effort for him to 
turn off ten or fifteen pages of an article for the Edinburgh be- 
tween five o'clock in the morning and breakfast — the time when 
he wrote most of his essays — than for a fountain to pour out 
water. Meanwhile he kept himself young by uproarious frolics 
with children. The house in Great Ormond Street was sometimes 
filled with his young friends ; and when Macaulay, getting behind 
the sofa, would build a den of newspapers, and creeping into it 
would roar like a hungry Bengal tiger, the boys and girls fairly 
shrieked with delight at the performance. 

In 1834 Macaulay received an appointment on the Supreme 
Council of India at a salary of ^10,000 a year. Lord Bentinck, 



LORD MACAULAY. V 

then Governor- General, was a man of high, unselfish character, 
and of broad political views. His object was to rule the country 
not simply in the interest of a powerful commercial company, but 
in the interest of the people themselves. In pursuance of this 
purpose he labored not only for the material progress of India, 
but for its intellectual and civil advancement. 

In the new member of the Council Lord Bentinck found a man 
after his own heart, one who was earnest, upright, able ; and when 
the Governor-General went back to England in 1835, he had the 
satisfaction of feeling that so far as Macaulay's influence could 
go — and it was sure to go far — he might depend on know- 
ing that his wise and comprehensive policy had a resolute and 
fearless advocate. 

During Macaulay's residence of between three and four years in 
Calcutta he did excellent service in the direction of law reform 
and of education. India to-day is reaping the harvest which his 
intelligence sowed. 

On his return to England Macaulay again entered Parliament, 
and not long after he became a member of the Cabinet. His 
fame was now established, and no great dinner party in the upper 
circles of London society was complete without the presence of 
this brilliant writer and talker. Before he left England some en- 
vious people had accused him of talking too much on such occa- 
sions, but "now," said Sydney Smith, "Macaulay has occasional 
flashes of silence which make him perfectly delightful." 

Macaulay never married, but seemed to live for his sisters, who 
were very dear to him. In 1841, while residing in lodgings at the 
" Albany," in the west end of London, he began the greatest of 
his works — the "History of England." It was just before he 
engaged on this that he wrote his famous essay on Clive — the 
ripe fruit of his experiences and researches while in India. From 
that time until his death, in 1859, he labored incessantly on what 
was to be, after all, only a half-finished embodiment of his pur- 
pose ; for his history instead of covering a century, or more, 
barely covers fifteen years. Two years before the end came he 
received a peerage, and became Baron Macaulay of Rothley ; but 



vi LORD M AC AULA Y. 

his health had already begun to break, and he wrote some time 
after, "In a week I have grown twenty years older." "Sitting 
with his eyes fixed on death " he went on page by page or hne by 
line according to his strength. He died, as it were, pen in hand, 
seated in his arm-chair, surrounded by his favorite books, in the 
library of his pleasant home, " Holly Lodge," London. In the 
southern transept of Westminster Abbey, in the " Poets' Corner," 
one sees at the foot of Addison's statue a plain gray slab set in 
the pavement ; on it this name is cut, followed by this quotation 
from Handel's noble hymn : — 

Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay. 

Born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, 

October 25, 1800. 

Died at Holly Lodge, Campden Hill, 

December 28, 1859. 



" His body is buried in peace, 
but his name liveth for evermore." 



D. H. M. 



LORD CLIVE. 



We^ have always thought it strange, that while the history of 
the Spanish empire in America is familiarly known to all the 
nations of Europe, the great actions of our countrymen in the 
East should, even among ourselves, excite little interest. Every 
schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled 
Atahualpa. But we doubt whether one in ten, even among Eng- 
lish gentlemen of highly cultivated minds, can tell who won the 
battle of Buxar,^ who perpetrated the massacre of Patna,* whether 
Surajah Dowlah^ ruled in Oude or in Travancore, or whether 
Holkar^ was a Hindoo or a Mussulman. Yet the victories of 
Cortes were gained over savages who had no letters, who were 

1 " The Life of Robert Lord Clive ; collected from the Family Papers, com- 
municated by the Earl of Powis." By Major-General Sir John Malcolm, K.C.B. 
3 vols. 8vo. London : 1836. 

2 From the Edinburgh Review, 1840. [The historical notes are confined to those 
points on which information cannot be readily obtained by the student from ordinary 
books of reference. The rhetorical notes, followed by the initials J. F. G., in 
brackets, are by Prof. Genung of Amherst College, Mass. D. H. M.] 

3 Buxar : a town of Bengal, Northeastern India, on the right bank of the Ganges. 
Here, in 1764, the British general, Sir Hector Munro, gained a great victory over 
the allied Indian forces of Meer Cossim, Nabob of Patna, and the Vizier of Oude. 

* Patna : a city of Bengal, on the right bank of the Ganges. Here, and in the 
vicinity, Meer Cossim, Nabob of Patna, while at war with the British, executed in 
cold blood two hundred defenceless English prisoners. 

5 Surajah Dowlah: Viceroy of Bengal (see page 32). The allusion to Oude 
and Travancore is merely rhetorical, one representing the northern and the other 
the southern extremity of India. 

s Holkar : the family name of several chiefs of the Mahrattas, a powerful tribe 
or confederacy which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries held possession of 
an immense district in Central and Western India. The Mahrattas were Brahmans 
in religion, and were noted for their courage and skill in war. Several of the Holkar 
chiefs were formidable enemies of the English. 



2 LORD CLIVE. 

ignorant of the use of metais/ who had not broken in a single 
animal to labor, who wielded no better weapons than those which 
could be made out of sticks, flints and fish-bones, who regard«li* 
a horse-soldier as a monster, half man and half beast, who took a 
harquebusier for a sorcerer, able to scatter the thunder and light- 
ning of the skies. The people of India, when we subdued them, 
were ten times as numerous as the Americans whom the Spaniards 
vanquished, and were at the same time quite as highly civilized 
as the victorious Spaniards. They had reared cities larger and 
fairer than Saragossa or Toledo, and buildings more beautiful and 
costly than the cathedral of Seville. They could show bankers 
richer than the richest firms of Barcelona or Cadiz, viceroys 
whose splendor far surpassed that of Ferdinand the Catholic, 
myriads of cavalry and long trains of artillery which would have 
astonished the Great Captain. It might have been expected, that 
every Englishman who takes any interest in any part of history 
would be curious to know how a handful of his countrymen, sep- 
arated from their home by an immense 'ocean, subjugated, in the 
course of a few years, one of the greatest empires in the world. 
Yet, unless we greatly err, this subject is to most readers, not only 
insipid, but positively distasteful. 

Perhaps the fault lies partly with the historians. Mr. Mill's 
book, though it has undoubtedly great and rare merit, is not suffi- 
ciently animated and picturesque to attract those who read for 
amusement. Orme, inferior to no English historian in style and 
power of painting, is minute even to tediousness. In one volume 
he allots, on an average, a closely printed quarto page to the 
events of every forty-eight hours. The consequence is, that his 
narrative, though one of the most authentic and one of the most 

1 Ignorant of the use of metals : Macaulay wrote this essay more than half a 
century ago ; and in this sentence, having a rhetorical motive for making the con- 
trast as strong as possible between the American Indians and the civilized inhabi- 
tants of India, he may have slightly exaggerated the case even as he knew it. Since 
he wrote, however, the researches of historians have'proved that the Aztecs or Mexi- 
cans were skilful workers in the precious metals ; and though iron was not known to 
them, yet bronze was extensively used by them for both tools and weapons. See on 
the Mexican civilization of that period the Encyclopcedia Britannica, article, Mexico. 



LORD CLIVE. 3 

finely written in our language, has never been very popular, and 
is now scarcely ever read. 

We fear that the volumes before us will not much attract those 
readers whom Orme and Mill have repelled. The materials placed 
at the disposal of Sir John Malcolm by the late Lord Powis were 
indeed of great value. But we cannot say that they have baen 
very skilfully worked up. It would, however, be unjust to criticise 
with severity a work which, if the author had lived to complete 
and revise it, would probably have been improved by conden- 
sation and by a better arrangement. We are the more disposed 
to perform the pleasing duty of expressing our gratitude to the 
noble family to which the public owes so much useful and curious 
information. 

The effect of the book, even when we make the largest allow- 
ance for the partiality of those who have furnished and of those 
who have digested the materials, is, on the whole, greatly to raise 
the character of Lord Clive. We are far indeed from sympathiz- 
ing with Sir John Malcolm, whose love passes the love of biog- 
raphers,^ and who can sete nothing but wisdom and justice in the 
actions of his idol. But we are at least equally far from concur- 
ring in the severe judgment of Mr. Mill, who seems to us to show 
less discrimination in his account of Clive than in any other part 
of his valuable work. Clive, like most men who are born with 
strong passions and tried by strong temptations, committed great 
faults. But every person who takes a fair and enlightened view. 
of his whole career must admit that our island, so fertile in heroes 
and statesmen, has scarcely ever produced a man more truly great 
either in arms or in council. 

The Clives had been settled, ever since the twelfth century, on 
an estate of no great value, near Market-Drayton in Shropshire. 
In the reign of George the First this moderate but ancient inheri- 
tance was possessed by Mr. Richard Clive, who seems to have 
been a plain man of no great tact or capacity. He had been 
bred to the law, and divided his time between professional busi- 

1 Passes the love of biographers : this clause is an example of Macaulay's 
fondness for Biblical diction. See 2 Samuel i. 26. [J. F. G.] 



4 LORD CLIVE. 

ness and the avocations ^ of a small proprietor. He married a lady 
from Manchester, of the name of Gaskill, and became the father 
of a very numerous family. His eldest son, Robert, the founder 
of the British empire in India, was born at the old seat of his 
ancestors on the twenty-ninth of September, 1725. 

Some lineaments of the character of the man were early dis- 
cerned in the child. There remain letters written by his relations 
when he was in his seventh year ; and from these letters it appears 
that, even at that early age, his strong will and his fiery passions, 
sustained by a constitutional intrepidity which sometimes seemed 
hardly compatible with soundness of mind, had begun to cause 
great uneasiness to his family. " Fighting," says one of his uncles, 
" to which he is out of measure addicted, gives his temper such a 
fierceness and imperiousness, that he flies out on every trifling 
occasion." The old people of the neighborhood still remember 
to have heard from their parents how Bob Clive climbed to the 
top of the lofty steeple of Market-Drayton, and with what terror 
the inhabitants saw him seated on a stone spout near the summit. 
They also relate how he formed all the idle lads of the town into 
a kind of predatory army, and compelled the shopkeepers to sub- 
mit to a tribute of apples and halfpence, in consideration of 
which he guaranteed the security of their windows. He was sent 
from school to school, making very httle progress in his learning, 
and gaining for himself everywhere the character of an exceedingly 
naughty boy. One of his masters, it is said, was sagacious enough 
to prophesy that the idle lad would make a great figure in the 
world. But the general opinion seems to have been that poor 
Robert was a dunce, if not a reprobate. His family expected 
nothing good from such slender parts and such a headstrong 
temper. It is not strange, therefore, that they gladly accepted 
for him, when he was in his eighteenth year, a writership ^ in the 

1 Avocations : this often misused word Macaulay here employs in its proper 
sense to denote not one's principal occupation, but the subordinate or side pursuits 
to which a person may occasionally devote himself. [J. F. G.] 

2 Writership : the word is here used in the sense of a clerkship or book- 
keeper's position. 



LORD CLIVE. 5 

service of the East India Company, and shipped him off to make 
a fortune or to die of a fever at Madras. 

Far different were the prospects of Clive from those of the 
youths whom the East India College now annually sends to the 
Presidencies of our Asiatic empire. The Company '^ was then 
purely a trading corporation. Its territory consisted of a few 
square miles, for which rent was paid to the native governments. 
Its troops were scarcely numerous enough to man the batteries of 
three or four ill-constructed forts, which had been erected for the 
protection of the warehouses. The natives, who composed a con- 
siderable part of these little garrisons, had not yet been trained in 
the discipline of Europe, and were armed, some with swords and 
shields, some with bows and arrows. The business of the servant 
of the Company was not, as now, to conduct the judicial, financial, 
and diplomatic business of a great country, but to take stock, to 
make advances to weavers, to ship cargoes, and, above all, to keep 
an eye on private traders who dared to infringe the monopoly. 
The younger clerks were so miserably paid that they could scarcely 
subsist without incurring debt ; the elder enriched themselves by 
trading on their own account ; and those who lived to rise to the 
top of the service often accumulated considerable fortunes. 

Madras, to which Clive had been appointed, was, at this time, 

1 The Company : the English East India Company was incorporated in 1600. 
Its original object was simply to obtain a part of the trade which the Portuguese and 
the Dutch then exclusively possessed with that country. Later, the French estab- 
lished themselves in India, and became the most formidable rivals of the English. 

In 1639 the Company purchased five square miles of land at Madras and built 
Fort St. George to protect that trading-post. In 1668 they obtained the island of 
Bombay, which the Portuguese king had ceded to the British Crown as part of the 
dower of the Princess Catherine of Braganza on her marriage to Charles II. In 
1686 the Company bought Calcutta, then a petty village, and built Fort William 
(1696) to protect it. 

In 1689 the Company resolved to consolidate their power and to become, as they 
said, "a nation in India"; but notwithstanding this resolution, nothing decisive 
was done until Clive gained the battle of Plassey (to be described later) in 1757. 
By that victory the British secured their first important territorial grasp on India. 
Up to that date Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay had been the only points of note 
held by the Company ; after that, their power gradually increased, until by 1856 they 
had virtually obtained possession of the entire peninsula. 



6 LORD CLIVE. 

perhaps, the first in importance of the Company's settlements. In 
the preceding century Fort St. George had risen on a barren spot 
beaten by a raging surf; and in the neighborhood a town, inhab- 
ited by many thousands of natives, had sprung up, as towns spring 
up in the East, with the rapidity of the prophet's gourd. There 
were already in the suburbs many white villas, each surrounded 
by its garden, whither the wealthy agents of the Company retired, 
after the labors of the desk and the warehouse, to enjoy the cool 
breeze which springs up at sunset from the Bay of Bengal. The 
habits of these mercantile grandees appear to have been more 
profuse, luxurious, and ostentatious, than those of the high judi- 
cial and political functionaries who have succeeded them. But 
comfort was far less understood. Many devices which now miti- 
gate the heat of the chmate, preserve health, and prolong life, were 
unknown. There was far less intercourse with Europe than at 
present. The voyage by the Cape, which in our time has often 
been performed within three months,^ was then very seldom 
accomplished in six, and sometimes protracted to more than a 
year. Consequently, the Anglo-Indian was then much more 
estranged from his country, much more addicted to Oriental 
usages, and much less fitted to mix in society after his return 
to Europe, than the AngloTndian of the present day. 

Within the fort and its precinct, the Enghsh exercised, by per- 
mission of the native government, an extensive authority, such as 
every great Indian land-owner exercised within his own domain. 
But they had never dreamed of claiming independent power. 
The surrounding country was ruled by the Nabob of the Carnatic, 
a deputy of the Viceroy of the Deccan, commonly called the 
Nizam, who was himself only a deputy of the mighty prince desig- 
nated by our ancestors as the Great Mogul. Those names, once 
so august and formidable, still remain. There is still a Nabob of 
the Carnatic, who lives on a pension allowed to him by the Eng- 
lish out of the revenues of the province which his ancestors ruled. 
There is still a Nizam, whose capital is overawed by a British can- 

1 Three months : the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 has greatly reduced 
this time. 



LORD CLIVE. 7 

tonment, and to whom a British resident gives, under the name of 
advice, commands which are not to be disputed. There is still a 
Mogul,^ who is permitted to play at holding courts, and receiving 
petitions, but who has less power to help or hurt than the youngest 
civil servant of the Company. 

Clive's voyage was unusually tedious even for that age. The 
ship remained some months at the Brazils, where the young 
adventurer picked up some knowledge of Portuguese, and spent 
all his pocket-money. He did not arrive in India till more than 
a year after he had left England. His situation at Madras was 
most painful. His funds were exhausted. His pay was. small. 
He had contracted debts. He was wretchedly lodged, no small 
calamity in a climate which can be made tolerable to an Euro- 
pean only by spacious and well-placed apartments. He had been 
furnished with letters of recommendation to a gentleman who 
might have assisted him ; but when he landed at Fort St. George 
he found that this gentleman had sailed for England. The lad's 
shy and haughty disposition withheld him from introducing him- 
self to strangers. He was several months in India before he be- 
came acquainted with a single family. The climate affected his 
health and spirits. His duties were of a kind ill suited to his 
ardent and daring character. He pined for his home, and his 
letters to his relations expressed his feelings in language softer and 
more pensive than we should have expected either from the way- 
wardness of his boyhood, or from the inflexible sternness of his 

1 Still a Mogul : in 1857 the memorable Sepoy mutiny broke out in Bengal. 
The chief cause of the insurrection appears to have been the belief of the natives 
that the English intended to compel them to abandon their religion and to accept 
Christianity. Added to this was the fact that a prediction had long been current 
among them, that the East India Company would cease to rule on the hundredth 
anniversary of the year in which Clive gained that famous victory at Plassey (1757), 
which laid the foundation of British power in India. 

The mutiny was quelled, though at fearful loss of life on both sides ; but, singu- 
larly enough, the dominion of the Company came to an end with the final suppres- 
sion of the insurgents, for in 1858, Parliament transferred the entire administration 
from the Company to the Crown. In 1877, Queen Victoria was proclaimed "Em- 
press of India"; she, therefore, now holds the position formerly claimed by the 
Great Mogul. 



8 LORD CLIVE 

later years. " I have not enjoyed," says he, " one happy day 
since I left my native country; " and again, "I must confess, at 
intervals, when I think of my dear native England, it affects me 
in a very particular manner. ... If I should be so far blest as to 
revisit again my own country, but more especially Manchester, the 
centre of all my wishes, all that I could hope or desire for would 
be presented before me in one view." 

One solace he found of the most respectable kind. The Gov- 
ernor possessed a good library, and permitted Clive to have 
access to it. The young man devoted much of his leisure to 
reading, and acquired at this time almost all the knowledge of 
books that he ever possessed. As a boy he had been too idle, as 
a man he soon became too busy, for literary pursuits. 

But neither climate nor poverty, neither studies nor the sorrows 
of a home-sick exile, could tame the desperate audacity of his 
spirit. He behaved to his official superiors as he had behaved 
to his school-masters, and was several times in danger of losing 
his situation. Twice, while residing in the Writers' Building, he 
attempted to destroy himself; and twice the pistol which he 
snapped at his own head failed to go off. This circumstance, it 
is said, affected him as a similar escape affected Wallenstein. 
After satisfying himself that the pistol was really well loaded, he 
burst forth into an exclamation that surely he was reserved for 
something great. 

About this time an event which at first seemed likely to destroy 
all his hopes in life suddenly opened before him a new path to 
eminence. Europe had been, during some years, distracted by 
the war of the Austrian Succession.^ George the Second was the 
steady ally of Maria Theresa. The ' house of Bourbon took the 
opposite side. Though England was even then the first of mari- 
time powers, she was not, as she has since become, more than a 
match on the sea for all the nations of the world together ; and 

1 War of the Austrian Succession : this was a war (1740-1748) between Queen 
Maria Theresa of Austria (supported by her alHes, England and Sardinia) and 
Frederick of Prussia, who, with other princes, laid claim to portions of her 
dominions. 



LORD CLIVE. 9 

she found it difficult to maintain a contest against the united 
navies of France and Spain. In the eastern seas France obtained 
the ascendency. Labourdonnais, governor of Mauritius, a man of 
eminent talents and virtues, conducted an expedition to the con- 
tinent of India in spite of the opposition of the British fleet, 
landed, assembled an army, appeared before Madras, and com- 
pelled the town and fort to capitulate. The keys were delivered 
up ; the French colors were displayed on Fort St. George ; and 
the contents of the Company's warehouses were seized as prize of 
war by the conquerors. It was stipulated by the capitulation that 
the EngUsh inhabitants should be prisoners of war on parole, and 
that the town should remain in the hands of the French till it 
should be ransomed. Labourdonnais pledged his honor that only 
a moderate ransom would be required. 

But the success of Labourdonnais had awakened the jealousy 
of his countryman, Dupleix, governor of Pondicherry. Dupleix, 
moreover, had already begun to revolve gigantic schemes, with 
which the restoration of Madras to the English was by no means 
compatible. He declared that Labourdonnais had gone beyond 
his powers ; that conquests made by the French arms on the con- 
tinent of India were at the disposal of the governor of Pondi- 
cherry alone, and that Madras should be razed to the ground. 
Labourdonnais was compelled to yield. The anger which the 
breach of the capitulation excited among the English, was in- 
creased by the ungenerous manner in which Dupleix treated the 
principal servants of the Company. The Governor and several 
of the first gentlemen of Fort St. George were carried under a 
guard to Pondicherry, and conducted through the town in a tri- 
umphal procession, under the eyes of fifty thousand spectators. 
It was with reason thought that this gross violation of public faith 
absolved the inhabitants of Madras from the engagements into 
which they had entered with Labourdonnais. Clive fled from the 
town by night in the disguise of a Mussulman, and took refuge at 
Fort St. David, one of the small English settlements subordinate 
to Madras. 

The circumstances in which he was now placed naturally led 



10 LORD CLIVE. 

him to adopt a profession better suited to his reckless and intrepid 
spirit than the business of examining packages and casting ac- 
counts. He solicited and obtained an ensign's commission in the 
service of the Company, and at twenty-one entered on his military 
career. His personal courage, of which he had, while still a writer, 
given signal proof by a desperate duel with a military bully, who 
was the terror of Fort St. David, speedily made him conspicuous 
even among hundreds of brave men. He soon began to show in 
his new calling other qualities which had not before been discerned 
in him, — ^ judgment, sagacity, deference to legitimate authority. 
He distinguished himself highly in several operations against the 
French, and was particularly noticed by Major Lawrence, who was 
•then considered as the ablest British officer in India. 

Clive had been only a few months in the army when intelligence 
arrived that peace had been concluded between Great Britain and 
France. Dupleix was in consequence compelled to restore Madras 
to the English Company ; and the young ensign was at liberty to 
resume his former business. He did indeed return for a short 
time to his desk. He again quitted it in order to assist Major 
Lawrence in some petty hostilities with the natives, and then again 
returned to it. While he was thus wavering between a military 
and a commercial life, events took place which decided his choice. 
The politics of India assumed a new aspect. There was peace 
between the English and French Crowns ; but there arose between 
the English and French Companies trading to the East a war most 
eventful and important, a war in which the prize was nothing less 
than the magnificent inheritance of the house of Tamerlane. 

The empire which Baber and his Moguls reared in the sixteenth 
century was long one of the most extensive and splendid in the 
world. In no European kingdom was so large a population sub- 
ject to a single prince, or so large a revenue poured into the 
Treasury. The beauty and magnificence of the buildings erected 
by the sovereigns of Hindostan amazed even travellers who had 
seen St. Peter's. The innumerable retinues and gorgeous decora- 
tions which surrounded the throne of Delhi dazzled even eyes 
which were accustomed to the pomp of Versailles. Some of the 



LOFD CLIVE. 11 

great viceroys who held their posts by virtue of commissions from 
the Mogul ruled as many subjects as the King of France or the 
Emperor of Germany. Even the deputies of these deputies 
'might well rank, as to extent of territory and amount of revenue, 
with the Grand Duke of Tuscany or the Elector of Saxony. 

There can be little doubt that this great empire, powerful and 
prosperous as it appears on a superficial view, was yet, even in its 
best days, far worse governed than the worst governed parts of 
Europe now are. The administration was tainted with all the 
vices of Oriental despotism, and with all the vices inseparable 
from the domination of race over race. The conflicting preten- 
sions of the princes of the royal house produced a long series of 
crimes and public disasters. Ambitious lieutenants of the sover- 
eign sometimes aspired to independence. Fierce tribes of Hindoos, 
impatient of a foreign yoke, frequently withheld tribute, repelled 
the armies of the government from the mountain fastnesses, and 
poured down in arms on the cultivated plains. In spite, however, 
of much constant maladministration, in spite of occasional con- 
vulsions which shook the whole frame of society, this great mon- 
arch}', on the whole, retained, during some generations, an outward 
appearance of unity, majesty, and energy. But, throughout the 
long reign of Aurungzebe, the state, notwithstanding all that the 
vigor and policy of the prince could effect, was hastening to disso- 
lution. After his death, which took place in the year 1707, the 
ruin was fearfully rapid. Violent shocks from without co-operated 
with an incurable decay which was fast proceeding within ; and in 
a few years the empire had undergone utter decomposition. 

The history of the successors of Theodosius bears no small 
analogy to that of the successors of Aurungzebe. But perhaps 
the fall of the Carlovingians furnishes the nearest parallel to the 
fall of the Moguls. Charlemagne was scarcely interred when the 
imbecility and the disputes of his descendants began to bring 
contempt on themselves and destruction on their subjects. The 
wide dominion of the Franks was severed into a thousand pieces. 
Nothing more than a nominal dignity was left to the abject heirs 
of an illustrious name, Charles the Bald, and Charles the Fat, and 



12 LORD CLIVE. 

Charles the Simple. Fierce invaders, differing from each other in 
race, language, and religion, flocked, as if by concert, from the 
farthest corners of the earth, to plunder provinces which the gov- 
ernment could no longer defend. The pirates of the Northern 
Sea extended their ravages from the Elbe to the Pyrenees and at 
length fixed their seat in the rich valley of the Seine. The 
Hungarian,^ in whom the trembling monks fancied that they rec- 
ognized the Gog or Magog ^ of prophecy, carried back the plunder 
of the cities of Lombardy to the depths of the Pannonian forests. 
The Saracen ruled in Sicily, desolated the fertile plains of Cam- 
pania, and spread terror even to the walls of Rome. In the midst 
of these sufferings, a great internal change passed upon the em- 
pire. The corruption of death began to ferment into new forms 
of life. While the great body, as a whole, was torpid and passive, 
every separate member began to feel with a sense, and to move with 
an energy all its own. Just here, in the most barren and dreary 
tract of European history, all feudal privileges, all modern nobility, 
take their source. It is to this point that we trace the power of 
those princes who, nominally vassals, but really independent, long 
governed, with the titles of dukes, marquesses, and counts, almost 
every part of the dominions which had obeyed Charlemagne. 

Such or nearly such was the change which passed on the 
Mogul empire during the forty years which followed the death 
of Aurungzebe. A succession of nominal sovereigns, sunk in 
indolence and debauchery, sauntered away life in secluded palaces, 
chewing bang, fondling concubines, and listening to buffoons. A 
succession of ferocious invaders descended through the western 
passes, to prey on the defenceless wealth of Hindostan. A Persian 
conqueror crossed the Indus, marched through the gates of Delhi, 
and bore away in triumph those treasures of which the magnifi- 

1 The Hungarian : this appears to refer to Attila, the Hun, known and dreaded 
as the " Scourge of God." In 432 he established himself in Pannonia, a part of 
Hungary, and in 452 he entered and ravaged Northern Italy. 

2 Gog and Magog : probably the tribes of Scythia. They were selected by the 
prophet Ezekiel (see Ezekiel xxxviii.-xxxix., and compare Revelation xx. 8) "as 
the symbol of earthly violence, arrayed against the people of God," but in the end 
meeting with utter destruction. • 



LORD CLIVE. 13 

cence had astounded Roe and Bernier, the Peacock Throne, on 
which the richest jewels of Golconda had been disposed by the 
most skilful hands of Europe, and the inestimable Mountain of 
Light,^ which, after many strange vicissitudes, lately shone in 
the bracelet of Runjeet Sing, and is now destined to adorn the 
hideous idol of Orissa. The Afghan soon followed to complete 
the work of devastation which the Persian had begun. The 
warlike tribes of Rajpootana threw off the Mussulman yoke. A 
band of mercenary soldiers occupied Rohilcund. The Seiks ruled 
on the Indus. The Jauts spread dismay along the Jumna. The 
highlands which border on the western sea-coast of India poured 
forth a yet more formidable race, a race which was long the terror 
of every native power, and which, after many desperate and 
doubtful struggles, yielded only to the fortune and genius of Eng- 
land. It was under the reign of Aurungzebe that this wild clan of 
plunderers first descended from their mountains ; and soon after 
his death, every corner of his wide empire learned to tremble at 
the mighty name of the Mahrattas.^ Many fertile viceroyalties 
were entirely subdued by them. Their dominions stretched across 
the peninsula from sea to sea. Mahratta captains reigned at 
Poonah, at Gualior, in Guzerat, in Berar, and in Tanjore. Nor 
did they, though they had become great sovereigns, therefore 
cease to be freebooters. They still retained the predatory habits 
of their forefathers. Every region which was not subject to their 
rule was wasted by their incursions. Wherever their kettledrums 
were heard, the peasant threw his bag of rice on his shoulder, hid 
his small savings in his girdle, and fled with his wife and children 
to the mountains or the jungles, to the milder neighborhood of 
the hyena and the tiger. Many provinces redeemed their harvests 
by the payment of an annual ransom. Even the wretched phan- 
tom who still bore the imperial title stooped to pay this ignominious 
blackmail. The camp-fires of one rapacious leader were seen 

1 Mountain of Light : the Kohinoor, a celebrated diamond of great size and 
value. It passed into the hands of the British in 1849, and was presented to Queen 
Victoria in 1850. 

2 Mahrattas : see note on Holkar, p. i ; also see map. 



14 LORD CLIVE. 

from the walls of the palace of Delhi. Another, at the head of his 
innumerable cavalry, descended year after year on the rice-fields 
of Bengal. Even the European factors trembled for their maga- 
zines. Less than a hundred years ago, it was thought necessary 
to fortify Calcutta against the horsemen of Berar, and the name 
of the Mahratta ditch still preserves the memory of the danger. 

Wherever the viceroys of the Mogul retained authority they 
became sovereigns. They might still acknowledge in words the 
superiority of the house of Tamerlane ; as a Count of Flanders 
or a Duke of Burgundy might have acknowledged the superiority 
of the most helpless driveller among the later Carlovingians. 
They might occasionally send to their titular sovereign a compli- 
mentary present, or solicit from him a title of honor. In truth, 
however, they were no longer lieutenants removable at pleasure, 
but independent hereditary princes. In this way originated those 
great Mussulman houses which formerly ruled Bengal and the 
Carnatic, and those which still, though in a state of vassalage, exer- 
cise some of the powers of royalty at Lucknow and Hyderabad. 

In what was this confusion to end ? Was the strife to continue 
during centuries ? Was it to terminate in the rise of another great 
monarchy? Was the Mussulman or the Mahratta to be the Lord 
of India? Was another Baber to descend from the mountains, 
and to lead the hardy tribes of Cabul and Chorasan against a 
wealthier and less warlike race? None of these events seemed 
improbable. But scarcely any man, however sagacious, would 
have thought it possible that a trading company, separated from 
India by fifteen thousand miles of sea, and possessing in India 
only a few acres for purposes of commerce, would, in less than a 
hundred years, spread its empire from Cape Comorin to the 
eternal snow of the Himalayas ; would compel Mahratta and 
Mohammedan to forget their mutual feuds in common sub- 
jection; would tame down even those wild races which had 
resisted the most powerful of the Moguls; and having united 
under its laws a hundred millions of subjects, would carry its 
victorious arms far to the east of the Burrampooter,' and far to 
1 Burrampooter : now spelled Brahmapootra or Brahmaputra. 



LORD CLIVE. 15 

the west of the Hydaspes, dictate terms of peace at the gates ot 
Ava, and seat its vassal on the throne of Candahar. 

The man who first saw that it was possible to found an European 
empire on the ruins of the Mogul monarchy was Dupleix. His 
restless, capacious and inventive mind had formed this scheme, 
at a time when the ablest servants of the English Company were 
busied only about invoices and bills of lading. Nor had he only 
proposed to himself the end. He had also a just and distinct 
view of the means by which it was to be attained. He clearly 
saw that the greatest forces which the princes of India could 
bring into the field would be no match for a small body of men 
trained in the discipline, and guided by the tactics, of the West. 
He saw also that the natives of India might, under European 
commanders, be formed into armies, such as Saxe or Frederic 
would be proud to command. He was perfectly aware that the 
most easy and convenient way in which an European adventurer 
could exercise sovereignty in India, was to govern the motions, 
and to speak through the mouth of some glittering puppet dignified 
by the title of Nabob or Nizam. The arts both of war and policy 
which a few years later were employed with such signal success 
by the EngHsh were first understood and practised by this ingeni- 
ous and aspiring Frenchman. 

The situation of India was such that scarcely any aggression 
could be without a pretext either in the old laws or in recent 
practice. All rights were in a state of utter uncertainty ; and the 
Europeans who took part in the disputes of the natives con- 
founded the confusion,^ by applying to Asiatic politics the public 
law of the West, and analogies drawn from the feudal system. 
If it was convenient to treat a Nabob as an independent prince 
there was an excellent plea for doing so. He was independent 
in fact. If it was convenient to treat him as a mere deputy of 
the Court of Delhi, there was no difficulty; for he was so in 

1 Confounded the confusion : it was Macaulay's custom, in writing, to adopt 
phrases that had become well known in literature without enclosing them in quota- 
tion marks, regarding them as common stock to be employed, or even varied, at 
pleasure. For this phrase, see Milton, Par. Lost. ii. 996. [J. F. G.] 



16 LORD CLIVE 

theory. If it was convenient to consider his office as an hereditary 
dignity, or as a dignity held during hfe only, or as a dignity held 
only during the good pleasure of the Mogul, arguments and prece- 
dents might be found for every one of those views. The party 
who had the heir of Baber in their hands represented him as the 
undoubted, the legitimate, the absolute sovereign, whom all subor- 
dinate authorities were bound to obey. The party against whom 
his name was used did not want plausible pretexts for maintaining 
that the empire was in fact dissolved, and that, though it might 
be decent to treat the Mogul with respect, as a venerable relic of 
an order of things which had passed away, it was absurd to regard 
him as the real master of Hindostan. 

In the year 1 748, died one of the most powerful of the new 
masters of India, the great Nizam al Mulk, Viceroy of the Deccan. 
His authority descended to his son, Nazir Jung. Of the provinces 
subject to this high functionary, the Carnatic was the wealthiest 
and the most extensive. It was governed by an ancient Nabob, 
whose name the English corrupted into Anaverdy Khan. 

But there were pretenders to the government both of the 
viceroyalty and of the subordinate province. Mirzapha Jung, a 
grandson of Nizam al Mulk, appeared as the competitor of Nazir 
Jung. Chunda Sahib, son-in-law of a former Nabob of the Car- 
natic, disputed the title of Anaverdy Khan. In the unsettled state 
of Indian law it was easy for both Mirzapha Jung and Chunda 
Sahib to make out something like a claim of right. In a society 
altogether disorganized, they had no difficulty in finding greedy 
adventurers to follow their standards. They united their interests, 
invaded the Carnatic, and applied for assistance to the French 
whose fame had been raised by their success against the English 
in the recent war on the coast of Coromandel. 

Nothing could have happened more pleasing to the subtile and 
ambitious Dupleix. To make a Nabob of the Carnatic, to make 
a Viceroy of the Deccan, to rule under their names the whole of 
southern India ; this was indeed an attractive prospect. He allied 
himself with the pretenders, and sent four hundred French soldiers, 
and two thousand sepoys, disciplined after the European fashion, 



LORD CLIVE. 17 

to the assistance of his confederates. A battle was fought. The 
French distinguished themselves greatly. Anaverdy Khan was 
defeated and slain. His son, Mohammed Ali, who was afterwards 
well known in England as the Nabob of Arcot, and who owes to 
the eloquence of Burke a most unenviable immortality, fled with 
a scanty remnant of his army to Trichinopoly ; and the con- 
querors became at once masters of almost every part of the 
Carnatic. 

This was but the beginning of the greatness of Dupleix. After 
some months of fighting, negotiation, and intrigue, his ability and 
good fortune seemed to have prevailed everywhere. Nazir Jung 
perished by the hands of his own followers ; Mirzapha Jung was 
master of the Deccan ; and the triumph of French arms and French 
policy was complete. At Pondicherry all was exultation and fes- 
tivity. Salutes were fired from the batteries, and Te Deum sung 
in the churches. The new Nizam came thither to visit his allies ; 
and the ceremony of his installation was performed there with 
great pomp. Dupleix, dressed in the garb worn by Mohamme- 
dans of the highest rank, entered the town in the same palanquin 
with the Nizam, and, in the pageant which followed, took prece- 
dence of all the court. He was declared Governor of India from 
the river Kristna to Cape Comorin, a country about as large as 
France, with authority superior even to that of Chunda Sahib. 
He was intrusted with the command of seven thousand cavalry. 
It was announced that no mint would be suffered to exist in the 
Carnatic except that at Pondicherry. A large portion of the 
treasures which former Viceroys of the Deccan had accumulated 
found its way into the coffers of the French governor. It was 
rumored that he had received two hundred thousand pounds ster- 
ling in money, besides many valuable jewels. In fact, there could 
scarcely be any limit to his gains. He now ruled thirty millions 
of people with almost absolute power. No honor or emolument 
could be obtained from the government but by his intervention. 
No petition, unless signed by him, was perused by the Nizam. 

Mirzapha Jung survived his elevation only a few months. But 
another prince of the same house was raised to the throne by 



18 LORD CLIVE. 

French influence, and ratified all the promises of his predecessor. 
Dupleix was now the greatest potentate in India. His country- 
men boasted that his name was mentioned with awe even in the 
chambers of the palace of Delhi. The native population looked 
with amazement on the progress which, in the short space of four 
years, an European adventurer had made towards dominion in 
Asia. Nor was the vainglorious Frenchman content with the 
reality of power. He loved to display his greatness with arrogant 
ostentation before the eyes of his subjects and of his rivals. Near 
the spot where his policy had obtained its chief triumph, by the 
fall ®f Nazir Jung and the elevation of Mirzapha, he determined 
to erect a column, on the four sides of which four pompous inscrip- 
tions, in four languages, should proclaim his glory to all the 
nations of the East. Medals stamped with emblems of his suc- 
cesses were buried beneath the foundations of this stately pillar, 
and round it arose a town bearing the haughty name of Dupleix 
Fatihabad, which is, being interpreted, the City of the Victory of 
Dupleix. 

The Enghsh had made some feeble and irresolute attempts to 
stop the rapid and brilliant career of the rival Company, and con- 
tinued to recognize Mohammed Ali as Nabob of the Carnatic. 
But the dominions of Mohammed Ali consisted of Trichinopoly 
alone ; and Trichinopoly was now invested by Chunda Sahib and 
his French auxiliaries. To raise the siege seemed impossible. 
The small force which was then at Madras had no commander. 
Major Lawrence had returned to England, and not a single officer 
of established character remained in the settlement. The natives 
had learned to look with contempt on the mighty nation which 
was soon to conquer and to rule them. They had seen the French 
colors flying on Fort St. George \ they had seen the chiefs of the 
English factory ^ led in triumph through the streets of Pondieherry ; 
they had seen the arms and counsels of Dupleix everpvhere suc- 
cessful, while the opposition which the authorities of Madras had 
made to his progress had served only to expose their own weak- 
ness and to heighten his glory. At this moment the valor and 
1 Factory : see note on p. 31. 



LORD CLIVE. 19 

genius of an obscure English youth suddenly turned the tide of 
fortune. 

Clive was now twenty-five years old. After hesitating for some 
time between a military and a commercial life, he had at length 
been placed in a post which partook of both characters, — that of 
commissary to the troops, with the rank of captain. The present 
emergency called forth all his powers. He represented to his 
superiors that unless some vigorous efforts were made Trichi- 
nopoly would fall, the house of Anaverdy Khan would perish, and 
the French would become the real masters of the whole peninsula 
of India. It was absolutely necessary to strike some daring blow. 
If an attack were made on Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic and 
the favorite residence of the Nabobs, it was not impossible that 
the siege of Trichinopoly would be raised. The heads of the 
English settlement, now thoroughly alarmed by the success of 
Dupleix, and apprehensive that, in the event of a new war between 
France and Great Britain, Madras would be instantly taken and 
destroyed, approved of Clive's plan, and intrusted the execution 
of it to himself. The young captain was put at the head of two 
hundred English soldiers, and three hundred sepoys, armed and 
disciplined after the European fashion. Of the eight officers 
who commanded this little force under him only two had ever 
been in action, and four of the eight were factors of the com- 
pany, whom Clive's example had induced to offer their services. 
The weather was stormy, but Clive pushed on through thunder, 
lightning, and rain to the gates of Arcot. The garrison, in a 
panic, evacuated the fort, and the English entered it without a 
blow. 

But Clive well knew that he should not be suffered to retain 
undisturbed possession of his conquest. He instantly began to 
collect provisions, to throw up works, and to make preparations 
for sustaining a siege. The garrison, which had fled at his ap- 
proach, had now recovered from its dismay, and having been 
swollen by large reinforcements from the neighborhood to a force 
of three thousand men, encamped close to the town. At dead of 
night, Clive marched out of the fort, attacked the camp by sur- 



20 LORD CLIVE. 

prise, slew great numbers, dispersed the rest, and returned to his 
quarters without having lost a single man. 

The inteUigence of these events was soon carried to Chunda 
Sahib, who, with his French allies, was besieging Trichinopoly. 
He immediately detached four thousand men from his camp, and 
sent them to Arcot. They were speedily joined by the remains 
of the force which Clive had lately scattered. They were further 
strengthened by two thousand, men from Vellore, and by a still 
more important reinforcement of a hundred and fifty French sol- 
diers whom Dupleix despatched from Pondicherry. The whole 
of this army, amounting to about ten thousand men, was under 
the command of Rajah Sahib, son of Chunda Sahib. 

Rajah Sahib proceeded to invest the fort of Arcot, which seemed 
quite incapable of sustaining a siege. The walls were ruinous, the 
ditches dry, the ramparts too narrow to admit the guns, the bat- 
tlements too low to protect the soldiers. The little garrison had 
been greatly reduced by casualties. It now consisted of a hun- 
dred and twenty Europeans and two hundred sepoys. Only four 
officers were left ; the stock of provisions was scanty ; and the 
commander, who had to conduct the defence under circumstances 
so discouraging, was a young man of five and twenty, who had 
been bred a book-keeper. 

During fifty days the siege went on. During fifty days the 
young captain maintained the defence with a firmness, vigilance, 
and ability, which would have done honor to the oldest marshal 
in Europe. The breach, however, increased day by day. The 
garrison began to feel the pressure of hunger. Under such cir- 
cumstances, any troops so scantily provided with officers might 
have been expected to show signs of insubordination; and the 
danger was peculiarly great in a force composed of men differing 
widely from each other in extraction, color, language, manners, 
and religion. But the devotion of the Uttle band to its chief sur- 
passed anything that is related of the Tenth Legion of Caesar, or 
of the Old Guard of Napoleon. The sepoys came to Clive, not 
to complain of their scanty fare, but to propose that all the grain 
should be given to the Europeans, who required more nourish- 



LORD CLIVE. 21 

ment than the natives of Asia. The thin gruel, they said, which 
was strained away from the rice, would suffice for themselves. 
History contains no more touching instance of military fidelity, 
or of the influence of a commanding mind. 

An attempt made by the government of Madras to relieve the 
place had failed. But there was hope from another quarter. A 
body of six thousand Mahrattas, half soldiers, half robbers, under 
the command of a chief named Morari Row, had been hired to 
assist Mohammed Ah ; but thinking the French power irresistible, 
and the triumph of Chunda Sahib certain, they had hitherto re- 
mained inactive on the frontiers of the Carnatic. The fame of 
the defence of Arcot roused them from their torpor. Morari 
Row declared that he had never before believed that Englishmen 
could fight, but that he would willingly help them since he saw 
that they had spirit to help themselves. Rajah Sahib learned 
that the Mahrattas were in motion. It was necessary for him to 
be expeditious. He first tried negotiations. He offered large 
bribes to Clive, which were rejected with scorn. He vowed that, 
if his proposals were not accepted, he would instantly storm 
the fort, and put every man in it to the sword. Clive told him 
in reply, with characteristic haughtiness, that his father was an 
usurper, that his army was a rabble, and that he would do well to 
think twice before he sent such poltroons into a breach defended 
by English soldiers. 

Rajah Sahib determined to storm the fort. The day was well 
suited to a bold military enterprise. It was the great Mohamme- 
dan festival which is sacred to the memory of Hosein the son of 
Ali. The history of Islam contains nothing more touching than 
the event which gave rise to that solemnity. The mournful legend 
relates how the chief of the Fatimites,^ when all his brave fol- 
lowers had perished round him, drank his latest draught of water, 
and uttered his latest prayer, how the assassins carried his head in 
triumph, how the tyrant smote the lifeless lips with his staff, and 
how a few old men recollected with tears that they had seen those 

^ Fatimites : descendants of Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed, and wife of 
the Calif Ali. 



22 LORD CLIVE. 

lips pressed to the lips of the prophet of God. After the lapse 
of near twelve centuries, the recurrence of this solemn season 
excites the fiercest and saddest emotions in the bosoms of the 
devout Moslem of India. They work themselves up to such 
agonies of rage and lamentation that some, it is said, have given 
up the ghost from the mere effect of mental excitement. They 
believe that whoever, during this festival, falls in arms against the 
infidels, atones by his death for all the sins of his life, and passes 
at once to the garden of the Houris. It was at this time that 
Rajah Sahib determined to assault Arcot. Stimulating drugs were 
employed to aid the effect of religious zeal, and the besiegers, 
drunk with enthusiasm, drunk with bang, rushed furiously to the 
attack. 

Clive had received secret intelligence of the design, had made 
his arrangements, and, exhausted by fatigue, had thrown himself 
on his bed. He was awakened by the alarm, and was instantly at 
his post. The enemy advanced, driving before them elephants 
whose foreheads were armed with iron plates. It was expected 
that the gates would yield to the shock of these living battering- 
rams. But the huge beasts no sooner felt the English musket' 
balls than they turned round, and rushed furiously away, trampHng 
on the multitude which had urged them forward. A raft was 
launched on the water which filled one part of the ditch. Clive, 
perceiving that his gunners at that post did not understand their 
business, took the management of a piece of artillery himself, and 
cleared the raft in a few minutes. Where the moat was dry the 
assailants mounted with great boldness ; but they were received 
with a fire so heavy and so well directed, that it soon quelled the 
courage even of fanaticism and of intgxication. The rear ranks 
of the English kept the front ranks supplied with a constant suc- 
cession of loaded muskets, and every shot told on the living mass 
below. After three desperate onsets, the besiegers retired behind 
the ditch. 

The struggle lasted about an hour. Four hundred of the as- 
sailants fell. The garrison lost only five or six men. The besieged 
passed an anxious night, looking for a renewal of the attack. But 



LORD CLIVE. 23 

when day broke, the enemy were no more to be seen. They had 
retired, leaving to the EngUsh several guns and a large quantity of 
ammunition. 

The news was received at Fort St. George with transports of joy 
and pride. Clive was justly regarded as a man equal to any com- 
mand. Two hundred Enghsh soldiers and seven hundred sepoys 
were sent to him, and with this force he instantly commenced 
offensive operations. He took the fort of Timery, effected a 
junction with a division of Morari Row's army, and hastened, by 
forced marches, to attack Rajah Sahib, who was at the head of 
about five thousand men, of whom three hundred were French. 
The action was sharp ; but Clive gained a complete victory. The 
military chest of Rajah Sahib fell into the hands of the conquerors. 
Six hundred sepoys who had served in the enemy's army came 
over to Clive's quarters and were taken into the British service. 
Conjeveram surrendered without a blow. The governor of Arnee 
deserted Chunda Sahib, and recognized the title of Mohammed 
Ali. 

Had the entire direction of the war been intrusted to Clive, it 
would probably have been brought to a speedy close. But the 
timidity and incapacity which appeared in all the movements of 
the English, except where he was personally present, protracted 
the struggle. The Mahrattas muttered that his soldiers were of 
a different race from the British whom they found elsewhere. The 
effect of this languor was that in no long time Rajah Sahib, at the 
head of a considerable army, in which were four hundred French 
troops, appeared almost under the guns of Fort St. George, and 
laid waste the villas and gardens of the gentlemen of the English 
settlement. But he was again encountered and defeated by Clive. 
More than a hundred of the French were killed or taken, a loss 
inore serious than that of thousands of natives. The victorious 
army marched from the field of battle to Fort St. David. On the 
road lay the City of the Victory of Dupleix, and the stately mon- 
ument which was designed to commemorate the triumphs of France 
in the East. Clive ordered both the city and the monument to 
be razed to the ground. He was induced, we believe, to take 



24 LORD CLIVE. 

this step, not by personal or national malevolence, but by a just 
and profound policy. The town and its pompous name, the pillar 
and its vaunting inscriptions, were among the devices by which 
Dupleix had laid the public mind of India under a spell. This 
spell it was Clive's business to break. The natives had been 
taught that France was confessedly the first power in Europe, and 
that the English did not presume to dispute her supremacy. No 
measure could be more effectual for the removal of this delusion 
than the public and solemn demolition of the French trophies. 

The government of Madras, encouraged by these events, deter- 
mined to send a strong detachment, under Clive, to reinforce the 
garrison of Trichinopoly. But just at this conjuncture. Major 
Lawrence arrived from England, and assumed the chief com- 
mand. From the waywardness and impatience of control which 
had characterized Clive, _ both at school and in the counting- 
house, it might have been expected that he would not, after such 
achievements, act with zeal and good humor in a subordinate 
capacity. But Lawrence had early treated him with kindness ; 
and it is bare justice to Clive to say that, proud and overbearing 
as he was, kindness was never thrown away upon him. He cheer- 
fully placed himself under the orders of his old friend, and exerted 
himself as strenuously in the second post as he could have done 
in the first. Lawrence well knew the value of such assistance. 
Though himself gifted with no intellectual faculty higher than 
plain good sense, he fully appreciated the powers of his brilliant 
coadjutor. Though he had made a methodical study of military 
tactics, and, like all men regularly bred to a profession, was dis- 
posed to look with disdain on interlopers, he had yet liberality 
enough to acknowledge that Clive was an exception to common 
rules. " Some people," he wrote, " are pleased to term Captain 
Clive fortunate and lucky ; but, in my opinion, from the knowl- 
edge I have of the gentleman, he deserved and might expect from 
his conduct everything as it fell out; — a man of an undaunted 
resolution, of a cool temper, and of a presence of mind which 
never left him in the greatest danger ; born a soldier ; for, without a 
mihtary education of any sort, or much conversing with any of the 



LORD CLIVE. 25 

profession, from his judgment and good sense, he led on an army 
like an experienced ofificer and a brave soldier, with a prudence 
that certainly warranted success." 

The French had no commander to oppose to the two friends. 
Dupleix, not inferior in talents for negotiation and intrigue to any 
European who has borne a part in the revolutions of India, was 
ill qualified to direct in person military operations. He had not 
been bred a soldier, and had no inclination to become one. His 
enemies accused him of personal cowardice ; and he defended 
himself in a strain worthy of Captain Bobadil.^ He kept away 
from shot, he said, because silence and tranquillity were propi- 
tious to his genius, and he found it difficult to pursue his medita- 
tions amidst the noise of fire-arms. He was thus under the 
necessity of intrusting to others the execution of his great warhke 
designs ; and he bitterly complained that he was ill served. He 
had indeed been assisted by one officer of eminent merit, the cel- 
ebrated Bussy. But Bussy had marched northward with the 
Nizam, and was fully employed in looking after his own interests, 
and those of France, at the court of that prince. Among the 
officers who remained with Dupleix, there was not a single man 
of capacity ; and many of them were boys, at whose ignorance 
and folly the common soldiers laughed. 

The English triumphed everywhere. The besiegers of Tri- 
chinopoly were themselves besieged and compelled to capitulate. 
Chunda Sahib fell into the hands of the Mahrattas, and was put 
to death, at the instigation probably of his competitor, Moham- 
med Ali. The spirit of Dupleix, however, was unconquerable, 
and his resources inexhaustible. From his employers in Europe 
he no longer received help or countenance. They condemned 
his policy. They gave him no pecuniary assistance. They sent 
him for troops only the sweepings of the galleys. Yet still he per- 
sisted, intrigued, bribed, promised, lavished his private fortune, 
strained his credit, procured new diplomas from Delhi, raised up 
new enemies to the Government of Madras on every side, and 

^ Captain Bobadil : a blustering braggart in Ben Jonson's comedy, " Every 
Man in his Humor." 



26 LORD CLIVE. 

found tools even among the allies of the English Company. But 
all was in vain. Slowly, but steadily, the power of Britain contin- 
ued to increase, and that of France to decHne. 

The health of Clive had never been good during his resi- 
dence in India ; and his constitution was now so much impaired 
that he determined to return to England. Before his departure 
he undertook a service of considerable difficulty, and performed it 
with his usual vigor and dexterity. The forts of Covelong and 
Chingleput were occupied by French garrisons. It was deter- 
mined to send a force against them. But the only force available 
for this purpose was of such a description that no officer but Clive 
would risk his reputation by commanding it. It consisted of five 
hundred newly levied sepoys, and two hundred recruits who had 
just landed from England, and who were the worst and lowest 
wretches that the Company's crimps could pick up in the flash- 
houses of London. Clive, ill and exhausted as he was, undertook 
to make an army of this undisciplined rabble, and marched with 
them to Covelong. A shot from the fort killed one of these extraor- 
dinary soldiers ; on which all the rest faced about and ran away, 
and it was with the greatest difficulty that Clive rallied them. On 
another occasion, the noise of a gun terrified the sentinels so much 
that one of them was found, some hours later, at the bottom of a 
well. Clive gradually accustomed them to danger, and, by expos- 
ing himself constantly in the most perilous situation, shamed them 
into courage. He at length succeeded in forming a respectable 
force out of his unpromising materials. Covelong fell. Clive 
learned that a strong detachment was marching to relieve it from 
Chingleput. He took measures to prevent the enemy from learn- 
ing that they were too late, laid an ambuscade for them on the 
road, killed a hundred of them with one fire, took three hundred 
prisoners, pursued the fugitives to the gates of Chingleput, laid 
siege instantly to that fastness, reputed one of th£ strongest in 
India, made a breach, and was on the point of storming, when the 
French commandant capitulated^ and retired with his men. 

1 French commandant capitulated : Clive's victories at Arcot and Trichi- 
nopoly — both within a radius of less than two hundred miles of Madras — had 



LORD CLIVE 27 

Clive returned to Madras victorious, but in a state of health 
which rendered it impossible for him to remain there long. He 
married at this time a young lady of the name of Maskelyne, sister 
of the eminent mathematician, who long held the post of Astron- 
omer Royal. She is described as handsome and accompUshed ; 
and her husband's letters, it is said, contain proofs that he was 
devotedly attached to her. 

Almost immediately after the marriage, Clive embarked with his 
bride for England. He returned a very different person from the 
poor slighted boy who had been sent out ten years before to seek 
his fortune. He was only twenty-seven ; yet his country already 
respected him as one of her first soldiers. There was then gen- 
eral peace in Europe. The Carnatic was the only part of the 
world where the English and French were in arms against each 
other. The vast schemes of Dupleix had excited no small uneasi- 
ness in the city of London ; and the rapid turn of fortune, which 
was chiefly owing to the courage and talents of Clive, had been 
hailed with great delight. The young captain was known at the 
India House by the honorable nick- name of General Clive, and 
was toasted by that appellation at the feasts of the Directors. On 
his arrival in England, he found himself an object of general 
interest and admiration. The East India Company thanked him 
for his services in the warmest terms, and bestowed on him 
a sword set with diamonds. With rare delicacy he refused to 
receive this token of gratitude, unless a similar comphment were 
paid to his friend and commander, Lawrence. 

It may easily be supposed that Clive was most cordially wel- 
comed home by his family, who were dehghted by his success, 
though they seem to have been hardly able to comprehend how 
their naughty idle Bobby had become so great a man. His 
father had been singularly hard of belief. Not until the news of 
the defence of Arcot arrived in England was the old gentleman 
heard to growl out that, after all, the booby had something in him. 

thwarted the French plans for getting possession of Southern India. Subsequent 
English victories completely broke the French power in India, so that before the 
close of 1761, it had practically become extinct. 



28 LORD CLIVE. 

His expressions of approbation became stronger and stronger as 
news arrived of one brilliant exploit after another : and he was at 
length immoderately fond and proud of his son. 

Clive's relations had very substantial reasons for rejoicing at 
his return. Considerable sums of prize money had fallen to his 
share ; and he had brought home a moderate fortune, part of 
which he expended in extricating his father from pecuniary diffi- 
culties, and in redeeming the family estate. The remainder he 
appears to have dissipated in the course of about two years. He | 
lived splendidly, dressed gayly even for those times, kept a ' 
carriage and saddle horses, and, not content with these ways of 
getting rid of his money, resorted to the most speedy and effect- 
ual of all modes of evacuation, a contested election followed by 
a petition. 

At the time of the general election of 1754, the government 
was in a very singular state. There was scarcely any formal oppo- 
sition. The Jacobites had been cowed by the issue of the last 
rebellion. The Tory party had fallen into utter contempt. It 
had been deserted by all the men of talents who had belonged to 
it, and had scarcely given a symptom of life during some years. 
The small faction which had been held together by the influence 
and promises of Prince Frederic, had been dispersed by his death. 
Almost every pubhc man of distinguished talents in the kingdom, 
whatever his early connections might have been, was in office, and 
called himself a Whig. But this extraordinary appearance of 
concord was quite delusive. The administration itself was dis- 
tracted by bitter enmities and conflicting pretensions. The chief 
object of its n^embers was to depress and supplant each other. 
The prime minister, Newcastle, weak, timid, jealous, and perfidi- 
ous, was at once detested and despised by some of the most 
important members of his government, and by none more than by 
Henry Fox, the Secretary at War. This able, daring, and ambitious 
man seized every opportunity of crossing the First Lord of the 
Treasury, from whom he well knew that he had little to dread and 
little to hope ; for Newcastle was through hfe equally afraid of 
breaking with men of parts and of promoting them. 



LORD CLIVE. 29 

Newcastle had set his heart on returning two members for St. 
Michael, one of those wretched Cornish boroughs^ which were 
swept away by the Reform Act in 1832. He was opposed by 
Lord Sandwich, whose influence had long been paramount there : 
and Fox exerted himself strenuously in Sandwich's behalf. Clive, 
who had been introduced to Fox, and very kindly received by 
him, was brought forward on the Sandwich interest, and was 
returned. But a petition was presented against the return, and 
was backed by the whole influence of the Duke of Newcastle. 

The case was heard, according to the usage of that time, before 
a committee of the whole House. Questions respecting elections 
were then considered merely as party questions. Judicial impar- 
tiality was not even affected. Sir Robert Walpole was in the habit 
of saying openly that, in election battles, there ought to be no 
quarter. On the present occasion the excitement was great. The 
matter really at issue was, not whether Clive had been properly or 
improperly returned, but whether Newcastle or Fox was to be 
master of the new House of Commons, and consequently first 
minister. The contest was long and obstinate, and success seemed 
to lean sometimes to one side and sometimes to the other. Fox 
put forth all his rare powers of debate, beat half the lawyers in 
the House at their own weapons, and carried division after divis- 
ion^ against the whole influence of the Treasury. The committee 
decided in Clive's favor. But when the resolution was reported 
to the House, things took a different course. The remnant of the 
Tory Opposition, contemptible as it was, had yet sufficient weight 
to turn the scale between the nicely balanced parties of Newcastle 
and Fox. Newcastle the Tories could only despise. Fox they 
hated, as the boldest and most subtle politician and the ablest 

1 Cornish boroughs : each of a number of petty villages in Cornwall formerly 
sent one or more representatives to Parliament, while on the other hand, large 
manufacturing towns which sprang up in Central and Northern England after the 
introduction of steam, in 1765, were wholly destitute of representation. 

This state of things was a fruitful cause of political corruption. The Reform 
Act of 1832 swept away the so-called " rotten boroughs " of Cornwall and elsewhere, 
and placed representation on a comparatively fair and sound basis. 

2 Division : the separation of members of Parliament into sides, in order to 
ascertain a vote. 



30 LORD CLIVE. 

debater among the Whigs, as the steady friend of Walpole, as the 
devoted adherent of the Duke of Cumberland. After wavering 
till the last moment they determined to vote in a body with the 
Prime Minister's friends. The consequence was that the House, 
by a small majority, rescinded the decision of the committee, and 
Clive was unseated. 

Ejected from Parliament, and straitened in his means, he natu- 
rally began to look again towards India. The Company and the 
Government were eager to avail themselves of his services. A 
treaty favorable to England had indeed been concluded in the 
Carnatic. Dupleix had been superseded, and had returned with 
the wreck of his immense fortune to Europe, where calumny and 
chicanery soon hunted him to his grave. But many signs indicated 
that a war between France and Great Britain was at hand ; and it 
was therefore thought desirable to send an able commander to the 
Company's settlements in India. The Directors appointed Clive 
governor of Fort St. David. The King gave him the commission 
of a lieutenant-colonel in the British army, and in 1755 he again 
sailed for Asia. 

The first service on which he was employed after his return to 
the East was the reduction of the stronghold of Gheriah. This 
fortress, built on a craggy promontory, and almost surrounded by 
the ocean, was the den of a pirate named Angria, whose barks 
had long been the terror of the Arabian Gulf Admiral Watson, 
who commanded the English squadron in the Eastern seas, burned 
Angria's fleet, while Clive attacked the fastness by land. The 
place soon fell, and a booty of a hundred and fifty thousand 
pounds sterling was divided among the conquerors. 

After this exploit, Clive proceeded to his government of Fort 
St. David. Before he had been there two months, he received 
intelligence which called forth all the energy of his bold and active 
mind. 

Of the provinces which had been subject to the house of Tam- 
erlane, the wealthiest was Bengal. No part of India possessed 
such natural advantages both for agriculture and for commerce. 
The Ganges, rushing through a hundred channels to the sea, has 



LORD CLIVE. 31 

formed a vast plain of rich mould which, even under the tropical 
sky, rivals the verdure of an Enghsh April. The rice fields yield 
an increase such as is elsewhere unknown. Spices, sugar, vege- 
table oils, are produced with marvellous exuberance. The rivers 
afford an inexhaustible supply of fish. The desolate islands along 
the sea-coast, overgrown by noxious vegetation, and swarming with 
deer and tigers, supply the cultivated districts with abundance of 
salt. The great stream which fertilizes the soil is, at the same 
time, the chief highway of Eastern commerce. On its banks, 
and on those of its tributary waters, are the'wealthiest marts, the 
most splendid capitals, and the most sacred shrines of India. 
The tyranny of man had for ages struggled in vain against the 
overflowing bounty of nature. In spite of the Mussulman despot 
and the Mahratta freebooter, Bengal was known through the East 
as the garden of Eden, as the rich kingdom. Its population mul- 
tiplied exceedingly. Distant provinces were nourished from the 
overflowing of its granaries ; and the noble ladies of London and 
Paris were clothed in the dehcate produce of its looms. The race 
by whom this rich tract was peopled, enervated by a soft chmate 
and accustomed to peaceful employments, bore the same relation 
to other Asiatics which the Asiatics generally bear to the bold and 
energetic children of Europe. The Castilians have a proverb, 
that in Valencia the earth is water and the men women ; and the 
description is at least equally applicable to the vast plain of the 
Lower Ganges. Whatever the Bengalee does he does languidly. 
His favorite pursuits are sedentary. He shrinks from bodily 
exertion ; and, though voluble in dispute and singularly pertina- 
cious in the war of chicane, he seldom engages in a personal con- 
flict, and scarcely ever enlists as a soldier. We doubt whether 
there be a hundred genuine Bengalees in the whole army of 
the East India Company. There never, perhaps, existed a peo- 
ple so thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign 
yoke. 

The great commercial companies of Europe had long possessed 
factories^ in Bengal. The French were settled, as they still are, at 
i Factories : lortified trading-posts. 



32 LORD CLIVE. 

Chandernagore ^ on the Hoogley. Higher up the stream the Dutch 
traders held Chinsurah. Nearer to the sea, the Enghsh had built 
Fort William. A church and ample warehouses rose in the vicin- 
ity. A row of spacious houses, belonging to the chief factors of 
the East India Company, lined the banks of the river ; and in the 
neighborhood had sprung up a large and busy native town, where 
some Hindoo merchants of great opulence had fixed their abode. 
But the tract now covered by the palaces of Chowringhee con- 
tained only a few miserable huts thatched with straw. A jungle, 
abandoned to waterfawl and alligators, covered the site of the 
present Citadel, and the Course,^ which is now daily crowded at 
sunset with the gayest equipages of Calcutta. For the ground on 
which the settlement stood, the EngUsh, like other great land- 
holders, paid rent to the government ; and they were, like other 
great landholders, permitted to exercise a certain jurisdiction 
within their domain. 

The great province of Bengal, together with Orissa and Behar,^ 
had long been governed by a viceroy, whom the English called 
Aliverdy Khan, and who, Hke the other viceroys of the Mogul, 
had become virtually independent. He died in 1756, and the 
sovereignty descended to his grandson, a youth under twenty years 
of age, who bore the name of Surajah Dowlah. Oriental despots 
are perhaps the worst class of human beings ; and this unhappy 
boy was one of the worst specimens of his class. His understand- 
ing was naturally feeble, and his temper naturally unamiable. His 
education had been such as would have enervated even a vigorous 
intellect, and perverted even a generous disposition. He was 
unreasonable, because no one ever dared to reason with him, and 

1 Chandernagore : this once famous town is twenty miles above Calcutta. The 
French made a settlement at this point in 1673, and in the time of Dupleix it 
carried on a considerable trade. It was taken by the English in 1757, and the 
fortifications demolished, but in 1763 it was restored to the French. In 1794 it was 
again captured by the English, and held until the peace of 1816, when it was again 
restored to the French who still govern it. It is not a place of any commercial 
importance. The principal French possessions in India are at Pondicherry. 

2 The Course : a noted pleasure drive. 

3 Bengal, Beliar, and Orissa ; in Northeastern India, with the district Chota 
Nagpur, they constitute the province of Bengal. 



LORD CLIVE. 33 

selfish, because he had never been made to feel himself dependent 
on the good will of others. Early debauchery had unnerved his 
body and his mind. He indulged immoderately in the use of 
ardent spirits, which inflamed his weak brain almost to madness. 
His chosen companions were flatterers sprung from the dregs of 
the people, and recommended by nothing but buffoonery and 
servility. It is said that he had arrived at that last stage of human 
depravity, when cruelty becomes pleasing for its own sake, when 
the sight of pain as pain, where no advantage is to be gained, no 
ofi'ence punished, no danger averted, is an agreeable excitement. 
It had early been his amusement to torture beasts and birds ; and 
when he gjrew up, he enjoyed with still keener relish the misery of 
his fellow-creatures. 

From a child Surajah Dowlah had hated the EngHsh. It was 
his whim to do so ; and his whims were never opposed. He had 
also formed a very exaggerated notion of the wealth which might 
be obtained by plundering them ; and his feeble and uncultivated 
mind was incapable of perceiving that the riches of Calcutta, had 
they been even greater than he imagined, would not compensate 
him for what he must lose, if the European trade, of which Ben- 
gal was the chief seat, should be driven by his violence to some 
other quarter. Pretexts for a quarrel were readily found. The 
English, in expectation of a war with France, had begun to fortify 
their settlement without special permission from the Nabob, A 
rich native, whom he longed to plunder, had taken refuge at Cal- 
cutta, and had not been delivered up. On such grounds as these 
Surajah Dowlah marched with a great army against Fort William. 

The servants of the Company at Madras had been forced by 
Dupleix to become statesmen and soldiers. Those in Bengal 
were still mere traders, and were terrified and bewildered by the 
approaching danger. The governor, who had heard much of 
Surajah Dowlah's cruelty, was frightened out of his wits, jumped 
into a boat and took refuge in the nearest ship. The military 
commandant thought that he could not do better than follow so 
good an example. The fort was taken after feeble resistance ; and 
great numbers of the English fell into the hands of the conquerors. 



34 LORD CLIVE. 

The Nabob seated himself with regal pomp in the principal hall 
of the factory, and ordered Mr. Holvvell, the first in rank among 
the prisoners, to be brought before him. His Highness talked 
about the insolence of the English, and grumbled at the smallness 
of the treasure which he had found ; but promised to spare their 
lives, and retired to rest. 

Then was committed that great crime, memorable for its sin- 
gular atrocity, memorable for the terrible retribution by which it 
was followed. The Enghsh captives were left at the mercy of the 
guards, and the guards determined to secure them for the night in 
the. prison of the garrison, a chamber known by the fearful name 
of the Black Hole. Even for a single European malefactor, the 
dungeon would, in such a climate, have been too close and narrow. 
The space was only twenty feet square. The air-holes were small 
and obstructed. It was the summer solstice, the season when the 
fierce heat of Bengal can scarcely be rendered tolerable to natives 
of England by lofty halls and by the constant waving of fans. 
The number of the prisoners was one hundred and forty-six. 
When they were ordered to enter the cell, they imagined the sol- 
diers were joking ; and, being in high spirits on account of the 
promise of the Nabob to spare their lives, they laughed and jested 
at the absurdity of the notion. They soon discovered their mis- 
take. They expostulated ; they entreated ; but in vain. The 
guards threatened to cut down all who hesitated. The captives 
were driven into the cell at the point of the sword, and the door 
was instantly shut and locked upon them. 

Nothing in history or fiction, not even the story which Ugolino ^ 
told in the sea of everlasting ice, after he had wiped his bloody 
lips on the scalp of his murderer, approaches the horrors which 
were recounted by the few survivors of that night. They cried 
for mercy. They strove to burst the door. Holvvell who, even in 
that extremity, retained some presence of mind, offered large 
bribes to the jailers. But the answer was that nothing could be 

1 Ugolino : an Italian nobleman who was defeated by Archbishop Ruggieri in 
the civil wars of the thirteenth century, cast into prison, and starved to death. Dante 
represents Ugolino and Ruggieri frozen up together in a lake of ice in hell, and the 
former devouring the head of the latter. 



LORD CIJVE. 35 

done without the Nabob's orders, that the Nabob was asleep, and 
that he would be angry if anybody woke him. Then the prison- 
ers w^t mad with despair. They trampled each other down, 
fought for the places at the windows, fought for the pittance of 
water with which the cruel mercy of the murderers mocked their 
agonies, raved, prayed, blasphemed, implored the guards to fire 
among them. The jailers in the mean time held lights to the 
bars, and shouted with laughter at the frantic struggles of their 
victims. At length the tumult died away in low gaspings and 
moanings. The day broke. The Nabob had slept off his debauch 
and permitted the door to be opened. But it was some time be- 
fore the soldiers could make a lane for the survivors, by piling up 
on each side the heaps of corpses on which the burning climate 
had already begun to do its loathsome work. When at length a 
passage was made, twenty-three ghastly figures, such as their own 
mothers would not have known, staggered one by one out of the 
charnel-house. A pit was instantly dug. The dead bodies, a 
hundred and twenty-three in number, were flung into it promis- 
cuously and covered up. 

But these things which, after the lapse of more than eighty 
years, cannot be told or read without horror, awakened neither 
remorse nor pity in the bosom of the savage Nabob. He inflicted 
no punishment on the murderers. He showed no tenderness to 
the survivors. Some of them indeed, from whom nothing was to 
be got, were sufl"ered to depart; but those from whom it was 
thought that anything could be extorted were treated with exe- 
crable cruelty. Holwell, unable to walk, was carried before the 
tyrant, who reproached him, threatened him, and sent him up the 
country in irons, together with some other gentlemen who were 
suspected of knowing more than they chose to tell about the 
treasures of the Company. These persons, still bowed down by 
the sufferings of that great agony, were lodged in miserable sheds, 
and fed only with grain and water, till at length the intercessions 
of the female relations of the Nabob procured their release. One 
Englishwoman had survived that night. She was placed in the 
harem of the Prince at Moorshedabad. 



36 LORD CLIVE. 

Surajah Dowlah, in the mean time, sent letters to his nominal 
sovereign at Delhi, describing the late conquest in the most pom- 
pous language. He placed a garrison at Fort William, foiibade 
Englishmen to dwell in the neighborhood, and directed that, in 
memory of his great actions, Calcutta should thenceforward be 
called Alinagore, that is to say, the Port of God. 

In August the news of the fall of Calcutta reached Madras, 
and excited the fiercest and bitterest resentment. The cry of 
the whole settlement was for vengeance. Within forty-eight hours 
after the arrival of the intelligence it was determined that an 
expedition should be sent to the Hoogley, and that Clive should 
be at the head of the land forces. The naval armament was 
under the command of Admiral Watson. Nine hundred EngHsh 
infantry, fine troops and full of spirit, and fifteen hundred sepoys, 
composed the army which sailed to punish a Prince who had 
more subjects than Lewis the Fifteenth or the Empress Maria 
Theresa. In October the expedition sailed ; but it had to make 
its way against adverse winds, and did not reach Bengal till 
December. 

The Nabob was revelling in fancied security at Moorshedabad. 
He was so profoundly ignorant of the state of foreign countries 
that he often used to say that there were not ten thousand men 
in all Europe ; and it had never occurred to him as possible, that 
the English would dare to invade his dominions. But, though 
undisturbed by any fear of their military power, he began to miss 
them greatly. His revenues fell off ; and his ministers succeeded 
in making him understand that a ruler may sometimes find it 
more profitable to protect traders in the open enjoyment of their 
gains than to put them to the torture for the purpose of discover- 
ing hidden chests of gold and jewels. He was already disposed 
to permit the Company to resume its mercantile operations in 
his country, when he received the news that an English armament 
was in the Hoogley. He instantly ordered all his troops to assem- 
ble at Moorshedabad, and marched towards Calcutta. 

Clive had commenced operations with his usual vigor. He took 
Budgebudge, routed the garrison of Fort William, recovered Cal- 



LORD CLIVE. 37 

cutta, stormed and sacked Hoogley. The Nabob, already dis- 
posed to make some concessions to the Enghsh, was confirmed in 
his pacific disposition by these proofs of their power and spirit. 
He accordingly made overtures to the chiefs of the invading 
armament, and offered to restore the factory, and to give compen- 
sation to those whom he had despoiled. 

Clive's profession was war ; and he felt that there was something 
discreditable in an accommodation with Surajah Dowlah. But 
his power was limited. A committee, chiefly composed of servants 
of the Company who had fled from Calcutta, had the principal 
direction of affairs ; and these persons were eager to be restored 
to their posts and compensated for their losses. The government 
of Madras, apprised that war had commenced in Europe, and 
apprehensive of an attack from the French, became impatient 
for the return of the armament. The promises of the Nabob 
were large, the chances of a contest doubtful ; and Clive consented 
to treat, though he expressed his regret that things should not be 
concluded in so glorious a manner as he could have wished. 

With this negotiation commences a new chapter in the life of 
Clive. Hitherto he had been merely a soldier carrying into effect, 
with eminent ability and valor, the plans of others. Henceforth 
he is to be chiefly regarded as a statesman ; and his military 
movements are to be considered as subordinate to his political 
designs. That in his new capacity he displayed great ability, and 
obtained great success, is unquestionable. But it is also unques- 
tionable that the transactions in which he now began to take a 
part have left a stain on his moral character. 

We can by no means agree with Sir John Malcom, who is obsti- 
nately resolved to see nothing but honor and integrity in the con- 
duct of his hero. But we can as httle agree with Mr. Mill, \vho 
has gone so far as to say that Clive was a man " to whom decep- 
tion, when it suited his purpose, never cost a pang." Clive seems 
to us to have been constitutionally the very opposite of a knave, 
bold even to temerity, sincere even to indiscretion, hearty in 
friendship, open in enmity. Neither in his private life, nor in 
those parts of his public life in which he had to do with his coun- 



38 LORD CLIVE. 

trymen, do we find any signs of a propensity to cunning. On the 
contrary, in all the disputes in which he was engaged as an Eng- 
lishman against Englishmen, from his boxing- matches at school 
to those stormy altercations at the India House and in Parliament 
amidst which his later years were passed, his very faults were those 
of a high and magnanimous spirit. The truth seems to have been 
that he considered Oriental politics as a game in which nothing 
was unfair. He knew that the standard of morality among the 
natives of India differed widely from that established in England. 
He knew that he had to deal with men destitute of what in 
Europe is called honor, with men who would give any promise 
without hesitation, and break any promise without shame, with 
men who would unscrupulously employ corruption, perjury, for- 
gery, to compass their ends. His letters show that the great 
difference between Asiatic and European morality was constantly 
in his thoughts. He seems to have imagined, most erroneously in 
our opinion, that he could effect nothing against such adversaries, 
if he was content to be bound by ties from which they were free, 
if he went on telling truth, and hearing none, if he fulfilled, to his 
own hurt, all his engagements with confederates who never kept 
an engagement that was not to their advantage. Accordingly this 
man, in the other parts of his life an honorable English gentleman 
and a soldier, was no sooner matched against an Indian intriguer, 
than he became himself an Indian intriguer, and descended, with- 
out scruple, to falsehood, to hypocritical caresses, to the substitu- 
tion of documents, and to the counterfeiting of hands. 

The negotiations between the English and the Nabob were 
carried on chiefly by two agents, Mr. Watts, a servant of the 
Com^jan)^, and a Bengalee of the name of Omichund. This Omi- 
chund had been one of the wealthiest native merchants resident 
at Calcutta, and had sustained great losses in consequence of the 
Nabob's expedition against that place. In the course of his com- 
mercial transactions, he had seen much of the English, and was 
peculiarly qualified to serve as a medium of communication be- 
tween them and a native court. He possessed great influence 
with his own race, and had in large measure the Hindoo talents, 



LORD CLIVE. 39 

quick observation, tact, dexterity, perseverance, and the Hitidoo 
vices, servility, greediness, and treachery. 

The Nabob behaved with all the faithlessness of an Indian 
statesman, and with all the levity of a boy whose mind had been 
enfeebled by power and self-indulgence. He promised, retracted, 
hesitated, evaded. At one time he advanced with his army in 
a threatening manner towards Calcutta ; but when he saw the 
resolute front which the English presented, he fell back in alarm, 
and consented to make peace with them on their own terms. The 
treaty was no sooner concluded than he formed new designs 
against them. He intrigued with the French authorities at Chan- 
dernagore. He invited Bussy to march from the Deccan to the 
Hoogley, and to drive the English out of Bengal. All this was 
well known to Clive and Watson. They determined accordingly 
to strike a decisive blow, and to attack Chandernagore, before the 
force there could be strengthened by new arrivals, either from the 
south of India, or from Europe. Watson directed the expedition 
by water, Clive by land. The success of the combined movements 
was rapid and complete. The fort, the garrison, the artillery, the 
military stores, all fell into the hands of the English. Nearly five 
hundred European troops were among the prisoners. 

The Nabob had feared and hated the English, even while he 
was still able to oppose to them their French rivals. The French 
were now vanquished ; and he began to regard the Enghsh with 
still greater fear and still greater hatred. His weak and unprinci- 
pled mind oscillated between serviUty and insolence. One day he 
sent a large sum to Calcutta, as part of the compensation due for 
the wrongs which he had committed. The next day he sent a 
present of jewels to Bussy, exhorting that distinguished officer to 
hasten to protect Bengal '' against Clive, the daring in war, on 
whom," says his Highness, " may all bad fortune attend." He 
ordered his army to march against the English. He counter- 
manded his orders. He tore Clive's letters. He then sent 
answers in the most florid language of compliment. He ordered 
Watts out of his presence and threatened to impale him. He 
again sent for Watts, and begged pardon for the insult. In the 



40 LORD CLIVE. 

m 

mean time, his wretched maladministration, his folly, his dissolute 
manners, and his love of the lowest company, had disgusted all 
classes of his subjects, soldiers, traders, civil functionaries, the 
proud and ostentatious Mohammedans, the timid, supple, parsi- 
monious Hindoos. A formidable confederacy was formed against 
him, in which were included RoyduUub, the minister of finance, 
Meer Jafher, the principal commander of the troops, and Jugget 
Seit, the richest banker in India. The plot was confided to the 
English agents, and a communication was opened between the 
malcontents at Moorshedabad and the committee at Calcutta. 

In the committee there was much hesitation ; but Clive's voice 
was given in favor of the conspirators, and his vigor and firmness 
bore down all opposition. It was determined that the English 
should lend their powerful assistance to depose Surajah Dowlah, 
and to place Meer Jaffier on the throne of Bengal. In return, 
Meer Jaffier promised ample compensation to the Company and 
its servants, and a liberal donative to the army, the navy, and the 
committee. The odious vices of Surajah Dowlah, the wrongs 
which the English had suffered at his hands, the dangers to which 
our trade must have been exposed, had he continued to reign, 
appear to us fully to justify the resolution of deposing him. But 
nothing can justify the dissimulation which Clive stooped to prac- 
tise. He wrote to Surajah Dowlah in terms so affectionate that 
they for a time lulled that weak prince into perfect security. The 
same courier who carried this " soothing letter," as Clive calls it, 
to the Nabob, carried to Mr. Watts a letter in the following terms : 
"Tell Meer Jaffier to fear nothing. I will join him with five 
thousand men who never turned their backs. Assure him I will 
march night and day to his assistance, and stand by him as long 
as I have a man left." 

It was impossible that a plot which had so many ramifications 
should long remain entirely concealed. Enough reached the ears 
of the Nabob to arouse his suspicions. But he was soon quieted 
by the fictions and artifices which the inventive genius of Omichund 
produced with miraculous readiness. All was going well; the 
plot was nearly ripe ; when Clive learned that Omichund was 



LORD CLIVE. 41 

likely to play false. The artful Bengalee had been promised a 
liberal compensation for all that he had lost at Calcutta. But this 
.would not satisfy him. His services had been great. He held 
the thread of the whole intrigue. By one word breathed in the 
ear of Surajah Dowlah, he could undo all that he had done. The 
lives of Watts, of Meer Jaffier, of all the conspirators, were at his 
mercy ; and he determined to take advantage of his situation and 
to make his own terms. He demanded three hundred thousand 
pounds sterling as the price of his secrecy and of his assistance. 
The committee, incensed by the treachery and appalled by the 
danger, knew not what course to take. But Clive was more than 
Omichund's match in Omichund's own arts. The man, he said, 
was a villain. Any artifice which would defeat such knavery was 
justifiable. The best course would be to promise what was asked. 
Omichund would soon be at their mercy ; and then they might 
punish him by withholding from him, not only the bribe which 
he now demanded, but also the compensation which all the other 
sufferers of Calcutta were to receive. 

His advice was taken. But how was the wary and sagacious 
Hindoo to be deceived ? He had demanded that an article 
touching his claims should be inserted in the treaty between Meer 
Jaffier and the English, and he would not be satisfied unless he 
saw it with his own eyes. Clive had an expedient ready. Two 
treaties were drawn up, one on white paper, the other on red, the 
former real, the latter fictitious. In the former Omichund's name 
was not mentioned ; the latter, which was to be shown to him, 
contained a stipulation in his favor. 

But another difficulty arose. Admiral Watson had scruples 
against signing the red treaty. Omichund's vigilance and acute- 
ness were such that the absence of so important a name would 
probably awaken suspicions. But Clive was not a man to do any- 
thing by halves. We almost blush to write it. He forged Admi- 
ral Watson's name. 

All was now ready for action. Mr. Watts fled secretly from 
Moorshedabad. Clive put his troops in motion, and wrote to the 
Nabob in a tone very different from that of his previous letters. 



42 LORD CLIVE. 

He set forth all the wrongs which the British had suffered, offered 
to submit the points in dispute to the arbitration of Meer Jaffier, 
and concluded by announcing that, as the rains were about to set 
in, he and his men would do themselves the honor of waiting o'n 
his Highness for an answer. 

Surajah Dowlah instantly assembled his whole force, and marched 
to encounter the EngUsh. It had been agreed that Meer Jaffier 
should separate himself from the Nabob, and carry over his 
division to Clive. But, as the decisive moment approached, the 
fears of the conspirator overpowered his ambition. Clive had 
advanced to Cossimbuzar ; the Nabob lay with a mighty power a 
few miles off at Plassey ; and still Meer Jafifier delayed to fulfil his 
engagements, and returned evasive answers to the earnest remon- 
strances of the English general. 

Clive was in a painfully anxious situation. He could place no 
confidence in the sincerity or in the courage of his confederate : 
and whatever confidence he might place in his own military talents, 
and in the valor and discipline of his troops, it was no light thing 
to engage an army twenty times as numerous as his own. Before 
him lay a river over which it was easy to advance, but over which, 
if things went ill, not one of his little band would ever return. 
On this occasion, for the first and for the last time, his dauntless 
spirit, during a few hours, shrank from the fearful responsibility of 
making a decision. He called a council of war. The majority 
pronounced against fighting ; and Clive declared his concurrence 
with the majority. Long afterwards, he said that he had neve 
called but one council of war, and that, if he had taken the advice 
of that council, the British would never have been masters of 
Bengal. But scarcely had the meeting broke up when he was 
himself again. He retired alone under the shade of some trees, 
and passed near an hour there in thought. He came back deter- 
mined to put everything to the hazard, and gave orders that all 
should be in readiness for passing the river on the morrow. 

The river was passed ; and, at the close of a toilsome day's 
march, the army, long after sunset, took up its quarters in a grove 
of mango trees near Plassey, within a mile of the enemy. Clive^ 



4 



LORD CLIVE. 43 

was unable to sleep ; he heard through the whole night the sound 
of drums and cymbals from the vast camp of the Nabob. It is 
not strange that even his stout heart should now and then have 
sunk, when he reflected against what odds, and for what a prize, 
he was in a few hours to contend. ^ 

Nor was the rest of Surajah Dowlah more peaceful. His mind, 
at once weak and stormy, was distracted by wild and horrible 
apprehensions. Appalled by the greatness and nearness of the 
crisis, distrusting his captains, dreading every one who approached 
him, dreading to be left alone, he sat gloomily in his tent, haunted, 
a Greek poet would have said, by the furies of those who had 
cursed him with their last breath in the Black Hole. 

The day broke, the day which was to decide the fate of India. 
At sunrise, the army of the Nabob, pouring through many open- 
ings of the camp, began to move towards the grove where the 
English lay. Forty thousand infantry, armed with firelocks, pikes, 
swords, bows and arrows, covered the plain. They were accom- 
panied by fifty pieces of ordnance of the largest size, each tugged 
by a long team of white oxen, and each pushed on from behind 
by an elephant. Some smaller guns, under the direction of a few 
French auxiUaries, were perhaps more formidable. The cavalry 
were fifteen thousand, drawn, not from the effeminate population 
of Bengal, but from the bolder race which .inhabits the northern 
provinces ; and the practised eye of Clive could perceive that the 
men and the horses were more powerful than those of the Carnatic. 
The force which he had to oppose to this great multitude con- 
sisted of only three thousand men. But of these nearly a thou- 
sand were Enghsh ; and all were led by English officers, and 
trained in the English discipline. Conspicuous in the ranks of 
the little army were the men of the Thirty-Ninth Regiment, which 
still bears on its colors, amidst many honorable additions won 
under Wellington in Spain and Gascony, the name of Plassey, and 
the proud motto. Primus in Indis. 

The battle commenced with a cannonade in which the artillery 
of the Nabob did scarcely any execution, while the few field- 
pieces of the Enghsh produced great effect. Several of the most 



44 LORD CLIVE. 

distinguished officers in Surajah Dovvlah's service fell. Disorder 
began to spread through his ranks. His own terror increased 
every moment. One of the conspirators urged on him the expedi- 
ency of retreating. The insidious advice, agreeing as it did with 
what his own terrors suggested, was readily received. He ordered 
his army to fall back, and this order decided his fate. Clive 
snatched the moment, and ordered his troops to advance. The 
confused and dispirited multitude gave way before the onset of 
disciphned valor. No mob attacked by regular soldiers was 
ever more completely routed. The little band of Frenchmen, 
who alone ventured to confront the English, were swept down the 
stream of fugitives. In an hour the forces of Surajah Dowlah 
were dispersed, never to reassemble. Only five hundred of the 
vanquished were slain. But their camp, their guns, their baggage, 
innumerable wagons, innumerable cattle, remained in the power 
of the conquerors. With the loss of twenty-two soldiers killed 
and fifty wounded, Clive had scattered an army of near sixty 
thousand men, and subdued an empire larger and more populous 
than Great Britain.^ 

Meer Jaffier had given no assistance to the English during the 

1 An empire larger tlian Great Britain : the battle of Plassey (1757) has been 
rightly called one of " the decisive battles of the world," since it resulted in the per- 
manent establishment of British dominion in India by the cession of Bengal, Behar, 
and Orissa to the English in 1765, — a district comprising about 150,000 square 
miles. To-day the English practically possess the entire peninsula, having an area 
of almost a million and a half square miles — or equal to that of nearly half the 
United States, exclusive of Alaska — and a population more than one-fifth that 
of the globe. 

The acquisition of this enormous territory may be conveniently divided into 
three periods: 1. That of Lord Clive, who (1748-1765) may be said to have ex- 
tended the British power, directly or indirectly, over the greater part of Eastern 
India from Calcutta to Madras {see map, showing the acquisition of Bengal, Behar, 
and Orissa, in 1765) ; 2. That of Lord Wellesley and Lord Hastings, who (1798- 
1820) gained the central part of the country and the west ; 3. That of Lord Dal- 
housie, who (1848-1856) consolidated these vast conquests, and extended the 
British frontiers on the northwest to the river Indus. (See on these points Pro- 
fessor Seeley's Lectures on the Expansion of England, Course II., Lecture' VI.) 

Clive's conquest — Bengal —still remains the keystone of the whole empire, and 
in the opinion of General Chesney, " it is even yet the one part of India which 
would be worth retaining were the rest to go." 



LORD CLIVE. 45 

action. But as soon as he saw that the fate of the day was de- 
cided, he drew off his division of the army, and, when the battle 
was over, sent his congratulations to his ally. The next morning 
he repaired to the English quarters, not a little uneasy as to the 
reception which awaited him there. He gave evident signs of 
alarm when a guard was drawn out to receive him with the honors 
due to his rank. But his apprehensions were speedily removed. 
Clive came forward to meet him, embraced him, saluted him as 
Nabob of the three great provinces of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, 
listened graciously to his apologies, and advised him to march 
without delay to Moorshedabad. 

Surajah Dowlah had fled from the field of battle with all the 
speed with which a fleet camel could carry, him, and arrived at 
Moorshedabad in little more than twenty-four hours. There he 
called his councillors round him. The wisest advised him to put 
himself into the hands of the English, from whom he had nothing 
worse to fear than deposition and confinement. But he attributed 
this suggestion to treachery. Others urged him to try the chance 
of war again. He approved the advice, and issued orders accord- 
ingly. But he wanted spirit to adhere even during one day to 
a manly resolution. He learned that Meer Jaffier had arrived ; 
and his terrors became insupportable. Disguised in a mean dress, 
with a casket of jewels in his hand, he let himself down at night 
from a window of his palace, and, accompanied by only two 
attendants, embarked on the river for Patna. 

In a few days Clive arrived at Moorshedabad, escorted by two 
hundred English soldiers and three hundred sepoys. For his 
residence had been assigned a palace which was surrounded by a 
garden so spacious that all the troops who accompanied him could 
conveniently encamp within it. The ceremony of the installation 
of Meer Jaffier was instantly performed. Clive led the new 
Nabob to the seat of honor, placed him on it, presented to him, 
after the immemorial fashion of the East, an offering of gold, and 
then, turning to the natives who filled the hall, congratulated them 
on the good fortune which had freed them from a tyrant. He 
was compelled on this occasion to use the services of an interpre- 



46 ■ LORD CLIVE. 

ter ; for it is remarkable that, long as he resided in India, inti- 
mately acquainted as he was with Indian politics and with the 
Indian character, and adored as he was by his Indian soldiery, he 
never learned to express himself with facility in any Indian lan- 
guage. He is said indeed to have been sometimes under the 
necessity of employing, in his intercourse with natives of India, 
the smattering of Portuguese which he had acquired when a lad, in 
Brazil. 

The new sovereign was now called upon to fulfil the engage- 
ments into which he had entered with his allies. A conference 
was held at the house of Jugget Seit, the great banker, for the 
purpose of making the necessary arrangements. Omichund came 
thither, fully believing himself to stand high in the favor of Clive, 
who, with dissimulation surpassing even the dissimulation of Ben- 
gal, had up to that day treated him with undiminished kindness. 
The white treaty was produced and read. Clive then turned to 
Mr. Scrafton, one of the servants of the Company, and said in 
English, " It is now time to undeceive Omichund." " Omi- 
chund," said Mr. Scrafton in Hindostanee, "the red treaty is a 
trick. You are to have nothing." Omichund fell back insensible 
into the arms of his attendants. He revived ; but his mind was 
irreparably ruined. Clive, who, though little troubled by scruples 
of conscience in his dealings with Indian politicians, was not in- 
human, seems to have been touched. He saw Omichund a few 
days later, spoke to him kindly, advised him to make a pilgrimage 
to one of the great temples of India, in the hope that change of 
scene might restore his health, and was even disposed, notwith- 
standing all that had passed, again to employ him in the public 
service. But from the moment of that sudden shock, the unhappy 
man sank gradually into idiocy. He who had formerly been dis- 
tinguished for the strength of his understanding and the simplicity 
of his habits, now squandered the remains of his fortune on 
childish trinkets, and loved to exhibit himself dressed in rich gar- 
ments, and hung with precious stones. In this abject state he 
languished a few months, and then died. 

We should not think it necessary to offer any remarks for the 



LORD CLIVE. 47 

purpose of directing the judgment of our readers, with respect to 
this transaction, had not Sir John Malcolm undertaken to defend 
it in all its parts. He regrets, indeed, that it was necessary to 
employ means so liable to abuse as forgery ; but he will not admit 
that any blame attaches to those who deceived the deceiver. He 
thinks that the English were not bound to keep faith with one 
who kept no faith with them, and that, if they had fulfilled their 
engagements with the wily Bengalee, so signal an example of suc- 
cessful treason would have produced a crowd of imitators. Now, 
we will not discuss this point on any rigid principles of moraUty. 
Indeed, it is quite unnecessary to do so ; for, looking at the ques- 
tion as a question of expediency ^ in the lowest sense of the word, 
and using no arguments but such as Machiavelli- might have em- 
ployed in his conferences with Borgia, we are convinced that 
Clive was altogether in the wrong, and that he committed, not 
merely a crime, but a blunder. That honesty is the best policy, 
is a maxim which we firmly believe to be generally correct, even 
with respect to the temporal interests of individuals ; but with 
respect to societies, the rule is subject to still fewer exceptions, 
and that for this reason, that the life of societies is longer than the 
life of individuals. It is possible to mention men who have owed 
great worldly prosperity to breaches of private faith ; but we 
doubt whether it be possible to mention a state which has on the 
whole been a gainer by a breach of public faith. The entire his- 
tory of British India is an illustration of the great truth, that it is 
not prudent to oppose perfidy to perfidy, and that the most effi- 
cient weapon with which men can encounter falsehood is truth. 
During a long course of years, the English rulers in India, sur- 
rounded by alhes and enemies whom no engagement could bind, 
have generally acted with sincerity and uprightness ; and the 

1 A question of expediency : Macaulay was fond of arguing questions on the 
lowest and most matter-of-fact motives ; implying thus that if his views were right 
on such grounds, of course they were right on higher grounds. An instance of this 
may be seen in his speech on the Copyright Bill. [ J. F. G.] 

2 Machiavelli : an Italian statesman, whose reputation for the advocacy of 
imscrupulous political methods has made him the type of expediency as opposed 
to abstract right. 



48 LORD CLIVE. 

event has proved that smcerity and uprightness are wisdom. Eng- 
lish valor and English intelligence have done less to extend and 
to preserve our Oriental empire than Enghsh veracity. All that 
we could have gained by imitating the doublings, the evasions, 
the fictions, the perjuries which have been employed against us is 
as nothing, when compared with what we have gained by being 
the one power in India on whose word reliance can be placed. 
No oath which superstition can devise, no hostage however 
precious, inspires a hundredth part of the confidence which is 
produced by the " yea, yea/' and " nay, nay," -^ of a British envoy. 
No fastness, however strong by art or nature, gives to its inmates 
a security like that enjoyed by the chief who, passing through the 
territories of powerful and deadly enemies, is armed with the 
British guarantee. The mightiest princes of the East can scarcely, 
by the offer of enormous usury, draw forth any portion of the 
wealth which is concealed under the hearths of their subjects. 
The British Government offers little more than four per cent. ; 
and avarice hastens to bring forth tens of millions of rupees from 
its most secret repositories. A hostile monarch may promise 
mountains of gold to our sepoys, on condition that they will 
desert the standard of the Company. The Company promises 
only a moderate pension after a long service. But every sepoy 
knows that the promise of the Company will be kept : he knows 
that if he lives a hundred years his rice and salt are as secure as 
the salary of the Governor-General : and he knows that there is 
not another state in India which would not, in spite of the most 
solemn vows, leave him to die of hunger in a ditch as soon as he 
had ceased to be useful. The greatest advantage which a govern- 
ment can possess is to be the one trustworthy government in the 
midst of governments which nobody can trust. This advantage 
we enjoy in Asia. Had we acted during the last two generations 
on the principles which Sir John Malcolm appears to have consid- 
ered as sound, had we as often as we had to deal with people like 
Omichund, retaliated by lying and forging, and breaking faith, 

1 " Yea, yea" and "nay, nay": Macaulay here employs Biblical idiom 
again ; see Matthew v. 37, and note, p. 3. [J. F. G.] 



LORD CLIVE. 49 

after their fashion, it is our firm behef that no courage or capacity 
could have upheld our empire. 

Sir John Malcolm admits that Clive's breach of faith could be 
justified only by the strongest necessity. As we think that 
breach of faith not only unnecessary, but most inexpedient, we 
need hardly say that we altogether condemn it. 

Omichund was not the only victim of the revolution. Surajah 
Dowlah was taken a few days after his flight, and was brought 
before Meer Jaffier. There he flung himself on the ground in 
convulsions of fear, and with tears and loud cries implored the 
mercy which he had never shown. Meer Jaffier hesitated ; but 
his son Meeran, a youth of seventeen, who in feebleness of brain 
and savageness of nature greatly resembled the wretched captive, 
was implacable. Surajah Dowlah was led into a secret chamber, 
to which in a short time the ministers of death were sent. In 
this act the English bore no part ; and Meer Jaffier understood so 
much of their feelings, that he thought it necessary to apologize 
to them for having avenged them on their most malignant enemy. 

The shower of wealth now fell copiously on the Company and 
its servants. A sum of eight hundred thousand pounds sterling, 
in coined silver, was sent down the river from Moorshedabad to 
Fort William. The fleet which conveyed this treasure consisted 
of more than a hundred boats, and performed its triumphal voy- 
age with flags flying and music playing. Calcutta, which a few 
months before had been desolate, was now more prosperous than 
ever. Trade revived ; and the signs of affluence appeared in 
every English house. As to Clive, there was no limit to his 
acquisitions but his own moderation. The treasury of Bengal 
was thrown open to him. There were piled up, after the usage 
of Indian princes, immense masses of coin, among which might 
not seldom be detected the florins and byzants with which, be- 
fore any European ship had turned the Cape of Good Hope, 
the Venetians purchased the stuffs and spices of -the East, Clive 
walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies 
and diamonds, and was at liberty to help himself. He accepted 
between two and three hundred thousand pounds. 



so LORD CLIVE. 

The pecuniary transactions between Meer Jafifier and Clive 
were sixteen years later condemned by the pubHc voice, and 
severely criticised in Parliament. They are vehemently defended 
by Sir John Malcolm. The accusers of the victorious general 
represented his gains as the wages of corruption, or as plunder 
extorted at the point of the sword from a helpless ally. The biog- 
rapher, on the other hand, considers these great acquisitions as 
free gifts, honorable alike to the donor and to the receiver, and 
compares them to the rewards bestowed by foreign powers on 
Marlborough, on Nelson, and on Wellington. It had always, he 
says, been customary in the East to give and receive presents ; 
and there was, as yet, no act of Parliament positively prohibiting 
English functionaries in India from profiting by this Asiatic usage. 
This reasoning, we own, does not quite satisfy us. We do not sus- 
pect Clive of selling the interests of his employers or his country ; 
but we cannot acquit him of having done what, if not in itself evil, 
was yet of evil example. Nothing is more clear than that a gen- 
eral ought to be the servant of his own government, and of no 
other. It follows that whatever rewards he receives for his ser- 
vices ought to be given either by his own government, or with the 
full knowledge and approbation of his own government. This 
rule ought to be strictly maintained even with respect to the 
merest bauble, with respect to a cross, a medal, or a yard of 
colored ribbon. But how can any government be well served, if 
those who command its forces are at liberty, without its permis- 
sion, without its privity, to accept princely fortunes from its allies ? 
It is idle to say that there was then no Act of Parliament prohibit- 
ing the practice of taking presents from Asiatic sovereigns. It is 
not on the Act which was passed at a later period for the purpose 
of preventing any such taking presents, but on grounds which 
were valid before the Act was passed, on grounds of common law 
and common sense, that we arraign the conduct of Clive. There 
is no Act that we- know of, prohibiting the Secretary of State for 
Foreign Affairs from being in the pay af continental powers, but 
it is not the less true that a Secretary who should receive a secret 
pension from France would grossly violate his duty, and would 



LORD CLIVE. 51 

deserve severe punishment. Sir John Malcohxi compares the 
conduct of CHve with that of the Duke of Welhngton. Suppose, 
— and we beg pardon for putting such a supposition even for the 
sake of argument, — that the Duke of Welhngton had, after the 
campaign of 1815, and while he commanded the army of occupa- 
tion in France, privately accepted two hundred thousand pounds 
from Louis the Eighteenth, as a mark of gratitude for the great 
services which his Grace had rendered to the House of Bourbon ; 
what would be thought of such a transaction? Yet the statute- 
book no more forbids the taking of presents in Europe now than 
it forbade the taking of presents in Asia then. 

At the same time, it must be admitted that in Clive's case, 
there were many extenuating circumstances. He considered him- 
self as the general, not of the Crown, but of the Company. The 
Company had, by implication at least, authorized its agents to 
enrich themselves by means of the hberality of the native princes, 
and by other means still more objectionable. It was hardly to be 
expected that the servant should entertain stricter notions of his 
duty than were entertained by his masters. Though Chve did 
not distinctly acquaint his employers with what had taken place 
and request their sanction, he did not, on the other hand, by 
studied concealment, show that he was conscious of having done 
wrong. On the contrary, he avowed with the greatest openness 
that the Nabob's bounty had raised him to affluence. Lastly, 
though we think that he ought not in such a way to have taken 
anything, we must admit that he deserves praise for having taken 
so little. He accepted twenty lacs of rupees. It would have cost 
him only a word to make the twenty forty. It was a very easy 
exercise of virtue to declaim in England against Clive's rapacity ; 
but not one in a hundred of his a;ccusers would have shown so 
much self-command in the treasury of Moorshedabad. 

Meer Jafifier could be upheld on the throne only by the hand 
which had placed him upon it. He was not, indeed, a mere boy ; 
nor had he been so unfortunate as to be born in the purple. He 
was not therefore quite so imbecile or quite so depraved as his 
predecessor had been. But he had none of the talents or virtues 



52 LORD CLIVE. 

which his post required ; and his son and heir, Meeran, was another 
Surajah Dowlah. Tlie recent revolution had unsettled the minds 
of men. Many chiefs were in open insurrection against the new 
Nabob. The viceroy of the rich and powerful province of Oude, 
who, like the other viceroys of the Mogul, was now in truth an 
independent sovereign, menaced Bengal with invasion. Nothing 
but the talents and authority of Clive could support the tottering 
government. While things were in this state a ship arrived with 
despatches which had been written at the India House before the 
news of the battle of Plassey had reached London. The Directors 
had determined to place the English settlements in Bengal under 
a government constituted in the most cumbrous and absurd man- 
ner ; and, to make the matter worse, no place in the arrangement 
was assigned to Chve. The persons who were selected to form 
this new government, greatly to their honor, took on themselves 
the responsibility of disobeying these preposterous orders, and 
invited Clive to exercise the supreme authority. He consented ; 
and it soon appeared that the servants of the Company had only 
anticipated the wishes of their employers. The Directors, on 
receiving news of Clive's brilUant success, instantly appointed him 
governor of their possessions in Bengal, with the highest marks of 
gratitude and esteem. His power was now boundless, and far 
surpassed even that which Dupleix had attained in the south of 
India. Meer Jaffier regarded him with slavish awe. On one 
occasion, the Nabob spoke with severity to a native chief of high 
rank, whose followers had been engaged in a brawl with some of 
the Company's sepoys. " Are you yet to learn," he said, " who 
that Colonel Clive is, and in what station God has placed him?" 
The chief, who, as a famous jester and an old friend of Meer 
Jafifier, could venture to take liberties, answered, " I affront the 
Colonel ! I, who never get up in the morning without making 
three low bows to his jackass ! " This was hardly an exaggera- 
tion. Europeans and natives were alike at Clive's feet. The 
English regarded him as the only man who could force Meer 
Jaffier to keep his engagements with them. Meer Jafifier regarded 
him as the only man who could protect the new dynasty against 
turbulent subjects and encroaching neighbors. 



LORD CLIVE. 53 

It is but justice to say that Clive used his power ably and vigor- 
ously for the advantage of his country. He sent forth an expedi- 
tion against the tract lying to the north of the Carnatic. In this 
tract the French still had the ascendency ; and it was important 
to dislodge them. The conduct of the enterprise was intrusted to 
an officer of the name of Forde, who was then little known, but 
in whom the keen eye of the governor had detected mihtary tal- 
ents of a high order. The success of the expedition was rapid and 
splendid. 

While a considerable part of the army of Bengal was thus 
engaged at a distance, a new and formidable danger menaced the 
western frontier. The Great Mogul was a prisoner at Delhi in the 
hands of a subject. His eldest son, named Shah Alum, destined 
to be, during many years, the sport of adverse fortune, and to be 
a tool in the hands, first of the Mahrattas, and then of the Eng- 
lish, had fled from the palace of his father. His birth was still 
revered in India. Some powerful princes, the Nabob of Oude in 
particular, were inclined to favor him. Shah Alum found it easy 
to draw to his standard great numbers of the military adventurers 
with whom every part of the country swarmed. An army of forty 
thousand men, of various races and religions, Mahrattas, Rohillas, 
Jauts, and Afghans, was speedily assembled round him ; and he 
formed the design of overthrowing the upstart whom the English 
had elevated to a throne, and of estabhshing his own authority 
throughout Bengal, Orissa, and Behar. 

Meer Jaffier's terror was extreme ; and the only expedient 
which occurred to him was to purchase, by the payment of a 
large sum of money, an accommodation with Shah Alum. This 
expedient had been repeatedly employed by those who, before 
him, had ruled the rich and unwarlike provinces near the mouth 
of the Ganges. But Clive treated the suggestion with a scorn 
worthy of his strong sense and dauntless courage. '' If you do 
this," he wrote, " you will have the Nabob of Oude, the Mahrattas, 
and many more, come from all parts of the confines of your coun- 
try, who will bully you out of money till you have none left in your 
treasury. I beg your Excellency will rely on the fidelity of the 



54 LORD CLIVE. 

English, and of those troops which are attached to you." He 
wrote in a similar strain to the governor of Patna, a brave native 
soldier whom he highly esteemed. " Come to no terms ; defend 
your city to the last. Rest assured that the English are stanch 
and firm friends, and that they never desert a cause in which they 
have once taken a part." 

He kept his word. Shah Alum had invested Patna, and was on 
the point of proceeding to storm, when he learned that the Col- 
onel was advancing by forced marches. The whole army which 
was approaching consisted only of four hundred and fifty Euro- 
peans and two thousand five hundred sepoys. But Clive and his 
Englishmen were now objects of dread over all the East. As 
soon as his advanced guard appeared, the besiegers fled before 
him. A few French adventurers who were about the person of 
the prince advised him to try the chance of battle ; but in vain. 
In a few days this great army, which had been regarded with so 
much uneasiness by the court of Moorshedabad, melted away 
before the mere terror of the British name. 

The conqueror returned in triumph to Fort WilUam, The joy 
of Meer Jaffier was as unbounded as his fears had been, and led 
him to bestow on his preserver a princely token of gratitude. 
The quit-rent which the East India Company were bound to pay 
to the Nabob for the extensive lands held by them to the south 
of Calcutta amounted to near thirty thousand pounds sterling a 
year. The whole of this splendid estate, sufficient to support 
with dignity the highest rank of the British peerage, was now 
conferred on Clive for life. 

This present we think Clive was justified in accepting. It was 
a present which, from its very nature, could be no secret. In 
fact, the Company itself was his tenant, and, by its acquiescence, 
signified its approbation of Meer Jaffier's grant. 

But the gratitude of Meer Jaffier did not last long. He had for 
some time felt that the powerful ally who had set him up might 
pull him down, and had been looking round for support against 
the formidable strength by which he had himself been hitherto 
supported. He knew that it would be impossible to find among 



LORD CLIVE. ■ 55 

the natives of India any force which would look the Colonel's 
little army in the face. The French power in Bengal was extinct. 
But the fame of the Dutch had anciently been great in the Eastern 
seas ; and it was not yet distinctly known in Asia how much the 
power of Holland had declined in Europe. Secret communica- 
tions passed between the court of Moorshedabad and the Dutch 
factory at Chinsurah ; and urgent letters were sent from Chinsurah, 
exhorting the government of Batavia to fit out an expedition which 
might balance the power of the English in Bengal. The authori- 
ties of Batavia, eager to extend the influence of their country, and 
still more eager to obtain for themselves a share of the wealth 
which had recently raised so many English adventurers to opu- 
lence, equipped a powerful armament. Seven large ships from 
Java arrived unexpectedly in the Hoogley. The military force on 
board amounted to fifteen hundred men, of whom about one-half 
were Europeans. The enterprise was well timed. Clive had sent 
such large detachments to oppose the French in the Carnatic that 
his army was now inferior in number to. that of the Dutch. He 
knew that Meer Jaffier secretly favored the invaders. He knew 
that he took on himself a serious responsibility if he attacked the 
forces of a friendly power ; that the English ministers could not 
wish to see a war with Holland added to that in which they were 
already engaged with France ; that they might disavow his acts ; 
that they might punish him. He had recently remitted a great 
part of his fortune to Europe, through the Dutch East India 
Company ; and he had therefore a strong interest in avoiding any 
quarrel. But he was satisfied that, if he suffered the Batavian 
armament to pass up the river and to join the garrison of Chin- 
surah, Meer Jaffier would throw himself into the arms of these 
new allies, and that the English ascendency in Bengal would be 
exposed to most serious danger. He took his resolution with 
characteristic boldness, and was most ably seconded by his offi- 
cers, particularly by Colonel Forde, to whom the most important 
part of the operations was intrusted. The Dutch attempted to 
force a passage. The Enghsh encountered them both by land and 
water. -On both elements the enemy had a great superiority of 



56 LORD CLIVE. 

force. On both they were signally defeated. Their ships were 
taken. Their troops were put to a total rout. Almost all the 
European soldiers, who constituted the main strength of the invad- 
ing army, were killed or taken. The conquerors sat down before 
Chinsurah ; and the chiefs of that settlement, now thoroughly 
humbled, consented to the terms which Clive dictated. They 
engaged to build no fortifications, and to raise no troops beyond a 
small force necessary for the police of their factories ; and it was 
distinctly provided that any violation of these covenants should be 
punished with instant expulsion from Bengal. 

Three months after this great victory, Clive sailed for England. 
At home, honors and rewards awaited him, not indeed equal to 
his claims or to his ambition, but still such as, when his age, his 
rank in the army, and his original place in society are considered, 
must be pronounced rare and splendid. He was raised to the 
Irish peerage, and encouraged to expect an English title. George 
the Third, who had just ascended the throne, received him with 
great distinction. The ministers paid him inarked attention ; and 
Pitt, whose influence in the House of Commons and in the coun- 
try was unbounded, was eager to mark his regard for one whose 
exploits had contributed so much to the lustre of that memorable 
period. The great orator had already in Parliament described 
Clive as a heaven-born general, as a man who, bred to the labor 
of the desk, had displayed a military genius which might excite 
the admiration of the King of Prussia. There were then no 
reporters in the gallery ; ^ but these words, emphatically spoken by 
the first statesman of the age, had passed from mouth to mouth, 
had been transmitted to Clive in Bengal, and had greatly delighted 
and flattered him. Indeed, since the death of Wolfe, Clive was 
the only English general of whom his countrymen had much 
reason to be proud. The Duke of Cumberland' had been gener- 

1 No reporters in the gallery : not only were reporters then rigidly excluded from 
the House of Parliament, but it was contrary to law for any one to publish a report 
of a Parliamentary debate. These restrictions were not wholly removed until 1771. 

2 Duke of Cumberland : he defeated the Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, 
grandson of James II., and his Scotch allies, at Culloden, Scotland, in I746. On 
that occasion the Duke was guilty of great cruelty, and consequently became very 
unpopular. 



LORD CLIVE. 57 

ally unfortunate ; and his single victory, having been gained over 
his countrymen and used with merciless severity, had been more 
fatal to his popularity than his many defeats. Conway, versed in 
the learning of his profession, and personally courageous, wanted 
vigor and capacity. Granby, honest, generous, and as brave as a 
lion, had neither science nor genius. Sackville, inferior in knowl- 
edge and abilities to none of his contemporaries, had incurred, 
unjustly as we beheve, the imputation most fatal to the character 
of a soldier. It was under the command of a foreign general that 
the British had triumphed at Minden and Warburg. The people, 
therefore, as was natural, greeted with pride and delight a captain 
of their own, whose native courage and self-taught skill had 
placed him on a level with the great tacticians of Germany. 

The wealth of Clive was such as enabled him to vie with the 
first grandees of England. There remains proof that he had re- 
mitted more than a hundred and eighty thousand pounds through 
the Dutch East India Company, and more than forty thousand 
pounds through the English company. The amount which he had 
sent home through private houses was also considerable. He had 
invested great sums in jewels, then a very common mode of remit- 
tance from India. His purchases of diamonds at Madras alone 
amounted to twenty-five thousand pounds. Besides a great mass 
of ready money, he had his Indian estate, valued by himself at 
twenty-seven thousand a year. His whole annual income, in the 
opinion of Sir John Malcolm, who is desirous to state it as low as 
possible, exceeded forty thousand pounds ; and incomes of forty 
thousand pounds at the time of the accession of George the Third 
were at least as rare as incomes of a hundred thousand pounds 
now. We may safely afiirm that no Englishman who started with 
nothing has ever, in any line of life, created such a fortune at the 
early age of thirty-four. 

It would be unjust not to add that Clive made a creditable use 
of his riches. As soon as the battle of Plassey had laid the foun- 
dation of his fortune, he sent ten thousand pounds to his sisters, 
bestowed as much more on other poor friends and relations, 
ordered his agent to pay eight hundred a year to his parents, 



58 LORD CLIVE. 

and to insist that they should keep a carriage, and settled five 
hundred a year on his old commander Lawrence, whose means 
were very slender. The whole sum which Clive expended in this 
manner may be calculated at fifty thousand pounds. 

He now set himself to cultivate Parliamentary interest. His 
purchases of land seem to have been made in great measure with 
that view, and after the general election of 1761, he found himself 
in the House of Commons, at the head of a body of dependents 
whose support must have been important to any administration. 
In English politics, however, he did not take a prominent part. 
His first attachments, as we have seen, were to Mr. Fox ; at a 
later period he was attracted by the genius and success of Mr. 
Pitt ; but finally he connected himself in the closest manner with 
George Grenville. Early in the session of 1764, when the illegal 
and impohtic persecution of that worthless demagogue Wilkes 
had strongly excited the public mind, the town was amused by an ^ 
anecdote, w^hich we have seen in some unpublished memoirs of 
Horace Walpole. Old Mr. Richard Clive, who since his son's 
elevation had been introduced into society for which his formei 
habits had not well fitted him, presented himself at the levee. | 
The King asked him where Lord Clive was. " He will be in town ' 
very soon," said the old gentleman, loud enough to be heard by 
the whole circle, " and then your Majesty will have another vote." 

But in truth all Clive's views were directed towards the country 
in which he had so eminently distinguished himself as a soldier 
and a statesman ; and it was by considerations relating to Lidia 
that his conduct as a public man in England was regulated. The 
power of the Company, though an anomaly, is in our time,^ we are 
firmly persuaded, a beneficial anomaly. In the time of Clive, it 
was not merely an anomaly, but a nuisance. There was no Board 
of Control. The Directory were for the most part mere traders, 
ignorant of general politics, ignorant of the peculiarities of the 
empire which had strangely become subject to them. The Court 
of Proprietors, wherever it chose to interfere, was able to have its 
way. That court was more numerous, as well as more powerful, 

1 In our time : see note on Mogul, p. 7. 



LORD CLIVE. 59 

than at present ; for then every share of five hundred pounds 
conferred a vote. The meetings were large, stormy, even riotous, 
the debates indecently virulent. All the turbulence of a Westmin- 
ster election, all the trickery and corruption of a Grampound^ elec- 
tion, disgraced the proceedings of this assembly on questions of 
the most solemn importance. Fictitious votes were manufactured 
on a gigantic scale. Clive himself laid out a hundred thousand 
pounds in the purchase of stock, which he then divided among 
nominal proprietors on whom he could depend, and whom he 
brought down in his train to every discussion and every ballot. 
Others did the same, though not to quite so enormous an extent. 

The interest taken by the public of England in Indian ques- 
tions was then far greater than at present, and the reason is 
obvious. At present a writer enters the service young ; he climbs 
slowly ; he is fortunate if, at forty-five, he can return to his coun- 
try with an annuity of a thousand a year, and with savings amount- 
ing to thirty thousand pounds. A great quantity of wealth is made 
by English functionaries in India ; but no single functionary makes 
a very large fortune, and what is made is slowly, hardly, and hon- 
estly earned. Only four or five high political offices are reserved 
for public men from England. The residences, the secretaryships, 
the seats in the boards of revenue and in the Sudder ^ courts are 
all filled by men who have given the best years of life to the ser- 
vice of the Company ; nor can any talents however splendid or 
any connections however powerful obtain those lucrative posts for 
any person who has not entered by the regular door, and mounted 
by the regular gradations. Seventy years ago, less money was 
brought home from the East than in our time. But it was divided 
among a very much smaller number of persons, and immense 
sums were often accumulated in a few months. Any EngUshman, 
whatever his age might be, might hope to be one of the lucky 
emigrants. If he made a good speech in Leadenhall Street,^ or 

1 Grampound : a town of Cornwall which was disfranchised in 1821 on account 
of its long-continued and notorious political corruption. See note on Cornish bor- 
oughs, p. 29. 

2 Sudder courts : the chief courts of justice at Calcutta. 

3 Leadenhall Street : the East India Company's House was in Leadenhall 
Street, London. 



60 LORD CLIVE. 

published a clever pamphlet m defence of the chairman, he might 
be sent out in the Company's service, and might return in three 
or four years as rich as Pigot or as Clive. Thus the India House 
was a lottery-office, which invited everybody to take a chance, and 
held out ducal fortunes as the prizes destined for the lucky few. 
As soon as it was known that there was a part of the world where 
a lieutenant-colonel had one morning received as a present an 
estate as large as that of the Earl of Bath or the Marquess of 
Rockingham, and where it seemed that such a trifle as ten or 
twenty thousand pounds was to be had by any British functionary 
for the asking, society began to exhibit all the symptoms of the 
South Sea year,^ a feverish excitement, an ungovernable impatience 
to be rich, a contempt for slow, sure, and moderate gains. 

At the head of the preponderating party in the India House, 
had long stood a powerful, able, and ambitious director of the 
name of Sulivan. He had conceived a strong jealousy of Chve, 
and remembered with bitterness the audacity with which the late 
governor of Bengal had repeatedly set at naught the authority of 
the distant Directors of the Company. An apparent reconciliation 
took place after Clive's arrival ; but enmity remained deeply 
rooted in the hearts of both. The whole body of Directors was 
then chosen annually. At the election of 1763, Clive attempted 
to break down the power of the dominant faction. The contest 
was carried on with a violence which he describes as tremendous. 
Sulivan was victorious, and hastened to take his revenge. The 
grant of rent which Clive had received from Meer Jaffier was, in 
the opinion of the best EngUsh lawyers, valid. It had been made 
by exactly the same authority from which the Company had 
received their chief possessions in Bengal, and the Company had 
long acquiesced in it. The Directors, however, most unjustly 
determined to confiscate it, and Clive was forced to file a bill in 
Chancery against them. 

But a great and sudden turn in affairs was at hand. Every ship 
from Bengal had for some time brought alarming tidings. The 

1 South Sea year : in 1720 a frenzy of speculation in South Sea trading schemes 
and in a multitude of other wild projects brought thousands to ruin in Great Britain. 



LORD CLIVE. 61 

internal misgovernment of the province had reached such a point 
that it could go no further. What, indeed, was to be expected 
from a body of public servants exposed to temptation such as 
that, as Clive once said, flesh and blood could not bear it, armed 
with irresistible power, and responsible only to the corrupt, turbu- 
lent, distracted, ill-formed Company, situated at such a distance 
that the average interval between the sending of a despatch and 
the receipt of an answer was above a year and a half? Accord- 
ingly, during the five years which followed the departure of Clive 
from Bengal, the misgovernment of the English was carried to a 
point such as seems hardly compatible with the very existence of 
society. The Roman proconsul, who, in a year or two, squeezed 
out of a province the means of rearing marble palaces and baths 
on the shores of Campania, of drinking from amber, of feasting 
on singing birds, of exhibiting armies of gladiators and flocks of 
camelopards ; the Spanish viceroy, who, leaving behind him the 
curses of Mexico or Lima, entered Madrid with a long train of 
gilded coaches, and of sumpter-horses trapped and shod with 
silver, were now outdone. Cruelty, indeed, properly so called, 
was not among the vices of the servants of. the Company. But 
cruelty itself could hardly have produced greater evils than sprang 
from their unprincipled eagerness to be rich. They pulled down 
their creature, Meer Jaffier. They set up in his place another 
Nabob, named Meer Cossim. But Meer Cossim had parts and a 
will; and though sufficiently inclined to oppress his subjects him- 
self, he could not bear to see them ground to the dust by oppres- 
sions which yielded him no profit, nay, which destroyed his 
revenue in the very source. The English accordingly pulled 
down Meer Cossim, and set up Meer Jaffier again; and Meer 
Cossim, after revenging himself by a massacre ^ surpassing in atro- 
city that of the Black Hole, fled to the dominions of the Nabob 
of Oude. At every one of these revolutions, the new prince 
divided among his foreign masters whatever could be scraped 
together in the treasury of his fallen predecessor. The immense 
population of his dominions was given up as a prey to those who 
1 Massacre : see note on Patna, p. i. 



62 LORD CLIVE. 

had made him a sovereign, and who could unmake him. The 
servants of- the Company obtained, not for their employers, but 
for themselves, a monopoly of almost the whole internal trade. 
They forced the natives to buy dear and to sell cheap. They 
insulted with impunity the tribunals, the police, and the fiscal 
authorities of the country. They covered with their protection 
a set of native dependents who ranged through the provinces, 
spreading desolation and terror wherever they appeared. Every 
servant of a British factor was armed with all the power of hisj 
master ; and his master was armed with all the power of the Cor 
pany. Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Ca| 
cutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to tl 
extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to li\ 
under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this. They foundi 
the little finger of the Company thicker than the loins ^ of Surajahi 
Dowlah. Under their old masters they had at least one resource 
when the evil became insupportable, the people rose and pulled- 
down the government. But the English government was not to 
be so shaken off. That government, oppressive as the most 
oppressive form of barbarian despotism, was strong with all the 
strength of civilization. It resembled the government of evil 
Genii, rather than the government of human tyrants. Even 
despair could not inspire the soft Bengalee with courage to con- 
front men of English breed, the hereditary nobility of mankind, 
whose skill and valor had so often triumphed in spite of tenfold 
odds. The unhappy race never attempted resistance. Sometimes 
they submitted in patient misery. Sometimes they fled from the 
white man, as their fathers had been used to fly from the Mahratta ; 
and the palanquin of the English traveller was often carried through 
silent villages and towns, which the report of his approach had 
made desolate. 

The foreign lords of Bengal were naturally objects of hatred to 

all the neighboring powers ; and to all the haughty race presented 

a dauntless front. The English armies, everywhere outnumbered, 

. were everywhere victorious. A succession of commanders, formed 

1 Thicker than the loins : see i Kings xii. lo, and note, p. 3. [J. F. G.] 



LORD CLIVE. 63 

in the school of Chve, still maintained the fame of their country. 
" It must be acknowledged," says the Mussulman historian of 
those times, " that this nation's presence of mind, firmness of 
temper, and undaunted bravery, are past all question. They join 
the most resolute courage to the most cautious prudence ; nor 
have they their equals in the art of ranging themselves in battle 
array and fighting in order. If to so many military qualifications 
they knew how to join the arts of government, if they exerted 
as much ingenuity and solicitude in relieving the people of God, 
as they do in whatever concerns their mihtary affairs, no nation in 
the world would be preferable to them, or worthier of command. 
But the people under their dominion groan everywhere, and are 
reduced to poverty and distress. Oh God ! come to the assistance 
of thine afflicted servants, and deliver them from the oppressions 
which they suffer." 

It was impossible, however, that even the military establishment 
should long continue exempt from the vices which pervaded 
every other part of the government. Rapacity, luxury, and the 
spirit of insubordination, spread from the civil service to the offi- 
cers of the army, and from the officers to the soldiers. The evil 
continued to grow till every mess-room became the seat of con- 
spiracy and cabal, and till the sepoys could be kept in order only 
by wholesale executions. 

At length the state of things in Bengal began to excite uneasi- 
ness at home. A succession of revolutions ; a disorganized admin- 
istration ; the natives pillaged, yet the Company not enriched ; 
every fleet bringing back fortunate adventurers who were able to 
purchase manors and to build stately dwellings, yet bringing back 
also alarming accounts of the financial prospects of the govern- 
ment ; war on the frontiers ; disaffection in the army ; the national 
character disgraced by excesses resembling those of Verres and 
Pizarro ; such was the spectacle which dismayed those who were 
conversant with Indian affairs. The general cry was that Clive, 
and Clive alone, could save the empire which he had founded. 

This feeling manifested itself in the strongest manner at a very 
full General Court of Proprietors. Men of aU parties, forgetting 



64 LORD CUVE. 

their feuds and trembling for their dividends, exclaimed that Clive 
was the man whom the crisis required, that the oppressive pro- 
ceedings which had been adopted respecting his estate ought to 
be dropped, and that he ought to be entreated to return to India. 

Clive rose. As to his estate, he said, he would make such 
propositions to the Directors, as would, he trusted, lead to an ami- 
cable settlement. But there was a still greater difficulty. It was 
proper to tell them that he never would undertake the govern- 
ment of Bengal while his enemy Sulivan was Chairman of the 
Company. The tumult , was violent. Sulivan could scarcely 
obtain a hearing. An overwhelming majority of the assembly 
was on Clive's side. Sulivan wished to try the result of a ballot 
But, according to the by-laws of the Company, there can be nd 
ballot except on a requisition signed by nine proprietors; and' 
though hundreds were present, nine persons could not be found 
to set their hands to such a requisition. 

Clive was in consequence nominated Governor and Comman- 
der-in-chief of the British possessions in Bengal. But he adherec 
to his declaration, and refused to enter on his office till the eveni 
of the next election of Directors should be known. The contest 
was obstinate ; but Clive triumphed. Sulivan, lately absolute 
master of the India House, was within a vote of losing his owr 
seat ; and both the chairman and the deputy-chairman were friends 
of the new governor. 

Such were the circumstances under which Lord Clive sailed for 
the third and last time to India. In Ma}^, 1765, he reached Cal- 
cutta ; and he found the whole machine of government even more 
fearfully disorganized than he had anticipated. Meer Jaffier, who 
had some time before lost his eldest son Meeran, had died while 
Clive was on his voyage out. The English functionaries at Cal- 
cutta had already received from home strict orders not to accept 
presents from the native princes. But, eager for gain, and un- 
accustomed to respect the commands of their distant, ignorant, 
and negligent masters, they again set up the throne of Bengal for 
sale. About one hundred and forty thousand pounds sterling were 
distributed among nine of the most powerful servants of the Com- 



LORD CLIVE. 65 

pany; and, in consideration of this bribe, an infant son of the 
deceased Nabob was placed on the seat of his father. The news 
of the ignominious bargain met Clive on his arrival. In a private 
letter, written, immediately after his landing, to an intimate friend, 
he poured out his feelings in language which, proceeding from 
a man so daring, so resolute, and so little given to theatrical dis- 
play of sentiment, seems to us singularly touching. " Alas ! " he 
says, " how is the English name sunk ! I could not avoid paying 
the tribute of a few tears to the departed and lost fame of the 
British nation — irrecoverably so, I fear. However, I do declare 
by that great Being who is the searcher of all hearts, and to whom 
we must be accountable if there be a hereafter, that I am come 
out with a mind superior to all corruption, and that I am deter- 
mined to destroy these great and growing evils, or perish in the 
attempt." 

The Council met, and Clive stated to them his full determina- 
tion to make a -thorough reform, and to use for that purpose the 
whole of the ample authority, civil and military, which had been 
confided to him. Johnstone, one of the boldest and worst men 
in the assembly, made some show of opposition. Clive interrupted 
him, and haughtily demanded whether he meant to question the 
power of the new government. Johnstone was cowed, and dis- 
claimed any such intention. All the faces round the board grew 
long and pale, and not another syllable of dissent was uttered. 

. Chve redeemed his pledge. He remained in India about a 
year and a half; and in that short time effected one of the most 
extensive, difficult, and salutary reforms that ever was accomplished 
by any statesman. This was the part of his life on which he 
afterwards looked back with the most pride. He had it in his 
power to triple his already splendid fortune ; to connive at abuses 
while pretending to remove them ; to conciliate the good-will of 
all the English in Bengal, by giving up to their rapacity a helpless 
and timid race, who knew not where lay the island which sent 
forth their oppressors, and whose complaints had little chance of 
being heard across fifteen thousand miles of ocean. He knew 
that if he applied himself in earnest to the work of reformation. 



66 LORD CLIVE. 

he should raise every bad passion in arms against him. He knew 
how unscrupulous, how implacable, would be the hatred of those 
ravenous adventurers who, having counted on accumulating in a 
few months fortunes sufficient to support peerages, should find all 
their hopes frustrated. But he had chosen the good part ; and 
he called up all the force of his mind for a battle far harder than 
that of Plassey. At first success seemed hopeless ; but soon all 
obstacles began to bend before that iron courage and that vehe- 
ment will. The receiving of presents from the natives was rigidly 
prohibited. The private trade of the servants of the Company 
was put down. The whole settlement seemed to be set, as one 
man, against these measures. But the inexorable governor de- 
clared that, if he could not find support at Fort William, he 
would procure it elsewhere, and sent for some civil servants from 
Madras to assist him in carrying on the administration. The most 
factious of his opponents he turned out of their offices. The 
rest submitted to what was inevitable ; and in a very short time 
all resistance was quelled. 

But Clive was far too wise a man not to see that the recent 
abuses were partly to be ascribed to a cause which could not fail 
to produce similar abuses as soon as the pressure of his strong 
hand was withdrawn. The Company had followed a mistaken 
policy with respect to the remuneration of its servants. The 
salaries were too low to afford even those indulgences which are 
necessary to the health and comfort of Europeans in a tropical 
climate. To lay by a rupee from such scanty pay was impossible. 
It could not be supposed that men of even average abiUties would 
consent to pass the best years of life in exile, under a burning 
sun, for no other consideration than these stinted wages. It had 
accordingly been understood, from a very early period, that the 
Company's agents were at liberty to enrich themselves by their 
private trade. This practice had been seriously injurious to the 
commercial interests of the corporation. That very intelligent 
observer, Sir Thomas Roe, in the reign of James the First, strongly 
urged the Directors to apply a remedy to the abuse. " Absolutely 
prohibit the private trade," said he; "for your business will be 



LORD CLIVE. 67 

better done. I know this is harsh. Men profess they come not 
for bare wages. But you will take away this plea if you give 
great wages to their content ; and then you know what you part 
from." 

In spite of this excellent advice, the Company adhered to the 
old system, paid low salaries, and connived at the indirect gains 
of the agents. The pay of a member of Council was only three 
hundred pounds a year. Yet it was notorious that such a func- 
tionary could not live in India for less than ten times that sum ; 
and it could not be expected that he would be content to live 
even handsomely in India without laying up something against 
the time of his return to England. . This system, before the con- 
quest of Bengal, might affect the amount of the dividends payable 
to the proprietors, but could do little harm in any other way. But 
the Company was now a ruling body. Its servants might still be 
called factors, junior merchants, senior merchants. But they were 
in truth proconsuls, propr^tors, procurators of extensive regions. 
They had immense power. Their regular pay was universally 
admitted to be insufficient. They were, by the ancient usage of 
the service, and by the implied permission of their employers, 
warranted in enriching themselves by indirect means ; and this 
had been the origin of the frightful oppression and corruption 
which had desolated Bengal. Clive saw clearly that it was absurd 
to give men power, and to require them to live in penury. He 
justly concluded that no reform could be effectual which should 
not be coupled with a plan for liberally remunerating the civil 
servants of the Company. The Directors, he knew, were not dis- 
posed to sanction any increase of the salaries out of their own 
treasury. The only course which remained open to the governor 
was one which exposed him to much misrepresentation, but which 
we think him fully justified in adopting. He appropriated to the 
support of the service the monopoly of salt, which had formed, 
down to our own time, a principal head of the Indian revenue ; 
and he divided the proceeds according to a scale which seems to 
have been not unreasonably fixed. He was in consequence accused 
by his enemies, and has been accused by historians, of disobeying 



68 LORD CLIVE. 

his instructions, of violating liis promises, of authorizing that very 
abuse which it was his special mission to destroy, namely, the 
trade of the Company's servants. But every discerning and im- 
partial judge will admit, that there was really nothing in common 
between the system which he set up and that which he was sent to 
destroy. The monopoly of salt had been a source of revenue 
to the governments of India before Clive was born. It cpn- 
tinued to be so long after his death. The civil servants were 
clearly entitled to a maintenance out of the revenue ; and all that 
Clive did was to charge a particular portion of the revenue with 
their maintenance. He thus, while he put an end to the practices 
by which gigantic fortunes had been rapidly accumulated, gave to ^ 
every British functionary employed in the East the means of 
slowly, but surely, acquiring a competence. Yet, such is the 
injustice of mankind, that none of those acts which are the real 
stains of his life has drawn on him so much obloquy as this meas- 
ure, which was in truth a reform necessary to the success of all 
his other reforms. 

He had quelled the opposition of the civil service ; that of the 
army was more formidable. Some of the retrenchments which 
had been ordered by the Directors affected the interests of the 
military service ; and a storm arose, such as even Caesar would 
not willingly have faced. It was no light thing to encounter the 
resistance of those who held the power of the sword, in a country 
governed only by the sword. Two hundred English officers 
engaged in a conspiracy against the government, and determined i 
to resign their commissions on the same day, not doubting thatj 
Clive would grant any terms rather than see the army, on which! 
alone the British empire in the East rested, left without command- 
ers. They little knew the unconquerable spirit with which theyj 
had to deal. Clive had still a few officers round his person onl 
whom he could rely. He sent to Fort St. George for a freshi 
supply. He gave commissions even to mercantile agents who] 
were disposed to support him at this' crisis ; and he sent orders \ 
that every officer who resigned should be instantly brought up to : 
Calcutta, The conspirators found that they had miscalculated.^ 



LORD CLIVE. 69 

The governor was inexorable. The troops were steady. The 
sepoys, over whom CUve had ahvays possessed extraordinary influ- 
ence, stood by him with unshaken fideUty. The leaders in the 
plot were arrested, tried, and cashiered. The rest, humbled and 
dispirited, begged to be permitted to withdraw their resignations. 
Many of them declared their repentance even with tears. The 
younger offenders Clive treated with lenity.' To the ringleaders 
he was inflexibly severe ; but his severity was pure from all taint 
of private malevolence. While he sternly upheld the just authority 
of his office, he passed by personal insults and injuries with mag- 
nanimous disdain. One of the conspirators was accused of having 
planned the assassination of the governor ; but Clive would not lis- 
ten to the charge. "The officers," he said, " are Englishmen, not 
assassins." 

While he reformed the civil service and established his authority 
over the army, he was equally successful in his foreign policy. 
His landing on Indian ground was the signal for immediate peace. 
The Nabob of Oude, with a large army, lay at that time on the 
frontier of Behar. He had been joined by many Afghans and 
Mahrattas, and there was no small reason to expect a general 
coalition of all the native powers against the English. But the 
name of Clive quelled in an instant all opposition. The enemy 
implored peace in the humblest language, and submitted to such 
terms as the new governor chose to dictate. 

At the same time, the government of Bengal was placed on a new 
footing. The power of the Enghsh in that province had hitherto 
been altogether undefined. It was unknown to the ancient con- 
stitution of the empire, and it had been ascertained by no com- 
pact. It resembled the power which, in the last decrepitude of 
the Western Empire, was exercised over Italy by the great chiefs 
of foreign mercenaries, the Ricimers and the Odoacers, who put 
up and pulled down at their pleasure a succession of insignificant 
princes, dignified with the names of Csesar and Augustus. But as 

1 Lenity : this simple and well-derived word ought to be noticed here, as much 
better than the clumsy word ' leniency,' which in newspaper English has largely 
come to take its place. [ J. F. G.] 



70 LORD CLIVE. 

in Italy, so in India, the warlike strangers at length found it expe- 
dient to give to a domination which had been established by arms 
the sanction of law and ancient prescription. Theodoric thought 
it politic to obtain from the distant court of Byzantium a com- 
mission appointing him ruler of Italy; and Clive, in the same 
manner, apphed to the Court of Delhi for a formal grant of the 
powers of which he already possessed the reahty. The Mogul 
was absolutely helpless ; and, though he murmured, had reason to 
be well pleased that the English were disposed to give solid 
rupees, which he never could have extorted from them, in exchange 
for a few Persian characters ^ which cost him nothing. A bargain 
was speedily struck ; and the titular sovereign of Hindostan issued 
a warrant, empowering the Company to collect and administer the 
revenues of Bengal, Orissa, and Behar. 

There was still a Nabob, who stood to the British authorities in 
the same relation in which the last drivelling Chilperics and Chil- 
derics of the Merovingian line stood to their able and vigorous 
Mayors of the Palace, to Charles Martel and to Pepin. At one 
time Clive had almost made up his mind to discard this phantom 
altogether ; but he afterwards thought it might be convenient still 
to use the name of Nabob, particularly in deahngs with other 
European nations. The French, the Dutch, and the Danes, would, 
he conceived, submit far more readily to the authority of the 
native Prince, whom they had always been accustomed to respect, 
than to that of a rival trading corporation. This policy may, at 
that time, have been judicious. But the pretence was soon found 
to be too flimsy to impose on anybody ; and it was altogether laid 
aside. The heir of Meer Jaffier still resides at Moorshedabad, the 

1 Persian characters : the warrant given by the Mogul, and which under the 
circumstances was only a formality, was written in the Persian language. By it 
the company obtained a revenue of nearly ^^4,000,000, out of which they bound 
themselves to pay to the Mogul and to the Nabob an annual income amounting to 
about ;^75o,ooo. The treaty concluding this momentous transaction was signed at 
Benares, and, as a Mohammedan writer of that time complains, was "finished in 
less time than would have been taken in the sale of a jackass." Two parties at 
least were entirely satisfied with the bargain : the East India Company henceforth 
felt pretty sure of a full treasury, and the Nabob wrote to Clive, " Thank God, I 
shall now have as many dancing-girls as I please." 



LORD CLIVE. 71 

ancient capital of his house, still bears the title of Nabob, is still 
accosted by the English as "Your Highness," and is still suffered 
to retain a portion of the regal state which surrounded his ances- 
tors. A pension of a hundred and sixty thousand pounds a year 
is annually paid to him by the government. His carriage is sur- 
rounded by guards, and preceded by attendants with silver maces. 
His person and his dwelling are exempted from the ordinary 
authority of the ministers of justice. But he has not the smallest 
share of political power, and is, in fact, only a noble and wealthy 
subject of the Company. 

It would have been easy for Clive, during his second adminis- 
tration in Bengal, to accumulate riches, such as no subject in 
Europe possessed. He might, indeed, without subjecting the rich 
inhabitants of the province to any pressure beyond that to which 
their mildest rulers had accustomed them, have received presents 
to the amount of three hundred thousand pounds a year. The 
neighboring princes would gladly have paid any price for his favor. 
But he appears to have strictly adhered to the rules which he had 
laid down for the guidance of others. The Rajah of Benares 
offered him diamonds of great value. The Nabob of Oude pressed 
him to accept a large sum of money, and a casket of costly jewels. 
Clive courteously but peremptorily refused : and it should be 
observed that he made no merit of his refusal, and that the facts 
did not come to light till after his death. He kept an exact 
account of his salary, of his share of the profits accruing from 
the trade in salt, and of those presents which, according to the 
fashion of the East, it would be churlish to refuse. Out of the 
sum arising from these resources he defrayed the expenses of his 
situation. The surplus he divided among a few attached friends 
who had accompanied him to India. He always boasted, and, as 
far as we can judge, he boasted with truth, that his last adminis- 
tration diminished instead of increasing his fortune. 

One large sum indeed he accepted. Meer Jaffier had left him 
by will above sixty thousand pounds sterling in specie and jewels : 
and the rules which had been recently laid down extended only to 
presents from the living, and did not affect legacies from the dead. 



72 LORD CLIVE. 

Clive took the money, but not for himself. He made the whole 
over to the Company, in trust for officers and soldiers invalided in 
their service. The fund which still bears his name, owes its origin 
to this princely donation. After a stay of eighteen months, the 
state of his health made it necessary for him to return to Europe. 
At the close of January, 1767, he quitted for the last time the 
country, on whose destinies he had exercised so mighty an influ- 
ence. 

His second return from Bengal was not, hke his first, greeted 
by the acclamations of his countrymen. Numerous causes were 
already at work which embittered the remaining years of his life, 
and hurried him to an untimely grave. His old enemies at the 
India House were still powerful and active ; and they had been 
reinforced by a large band of allies, whose violence far exceeded 
their own. The whole crew of pilferers and oppressors from whom 
he had rescued Bengal persecuted him with the implacable rancor 
which belongs to such abject natures. Many of them even in- 
vested their property in India stock, merely that they might be 
better able to annoy the man whose firmness had set bounds to 
their rapacity. Lying newspapers were set up for no purpose but 
to abuse him ; and the temper of the public mind was then such, 
that these arts, which under ordinary circumstances would have 
been ineffectual against truth and merit, produced an extraordinary 
impression. 

The great events which had taken place in India had called 
into existence a new class of EngUshmen, to whom their country- 
men gave the name of Nabobs. These persons had generally 
sprung from famiUes neither ancient nor opulent ; they had gen- 
erally been sent at an early age to the East ; and they had there 
acquired large fortunes, which they had brought back to their 
native land. It was natural that, not having much opportunity of 
mixing with the best society, they should exhibit some of the 
awkwardness and some of the pomposity of upstarts. It was 
natural that, during their sojourn in Asia, they should have ac- 
quired some tastes and habits surprising, if not disgusting, to .per- 
sons who had never quitted Europe. It was natural that, having 



LORD CLIVE. 73 

enjoyed great consideration in the East, they should not be dis- 
posed to sink into obscurity at home ; and as they had money, 
and had not birth or high connection, it was natural that they 
should display a little obtrusively the single advantage that they 
possessed. Wherever they settled there was a kind of feud be- 
tween them and the old nobility and gentry, similar to that which 
raged in France between the farmer-general ^ and the marquess. 
This enmity to the aristocracy long continued to distinguish the 
servants of the Company. More than twenty years after the time 
of which we are now speaking, Burke pronounced that among the 
Jacobins might be reckoned " the East Indians almost to a man, 
who cannot bear to find that their present importance does not 
bear a proportion to their wealth." 

The Nabobs soon became a most unpopular class of men. 
Some of them had in the East displayed eminent talents, and 
rendered great services to the state ; but at home their talents 
were not shown to advantage, and their services were little known. 
That they had sprung from obscurity, that they had acquired great 
wealth, that they exhibited it insolently, that they spent it extrava- 
gantly, that they raised the price of everything in their neighbor- 
hood, from fresh eggs to rotten boroughs,^ that their liveries out- 
shone those of dukes, that their coaches were finer than that of 
the Lord Mayor, that the examples of their large and ill-governed 
households corrupted half the servants of the country, that some 
of them, with all their magnificence, could not catch the tone of 
good society, but, in spite of the stud and the crowd of menials, 
of the plate and the Dresden china, of the venison and the Bur- 
gundy, were still low men ; these were things which excited, both 
in the class from which they had sprung and in the class in which 
they attempted to force themselves, the bitter aversion which is 
the effect of mingled envy and contempt. But when it was also 
rumored that the fortune which had enabled its possessor to 

1 Farmer -general : one of a privileged class which collected the taxes in France ; 
thereby acquiring enormous wealth through oppression and extortion. The fanner- 
generals were plebeians by birth, and were regarded by the nobility with hatred and 
contempt. 

2 Botteu boroughs : see note on Cornwall boroughs, p. 29. 



74 LORD CLIVE. 

eclipse the Lord Lieutenant on tlie race-ground, or to carry the 
county against the head of a house as old as Domesday Book/ 
had been accumulated by violating public faith, by deposing legiti- 
mate princes, by reducing whole provinces to beggary, all the 
higher and better as well as all the low and evil parts of human 
nature were stirred against the wretch who had obtained by guilt 
and dishonor the riches which he now lavished with arrogant and 
inelegant profusion. The unfortunate Nabob seemed to be made 
up of those foibles against which comedy has pointed the most 
merciless ridicule, and of those crimes which have thrown the 
deepest gloom over tragedy, of Turcaret ' and Nero, of Monsieur 
Jourdain ^ and Richard the Third. A tempest of execration and 
derision, such as can be compared only to that outbreak of public 
feeling against the Puritans which took place at the time of the 
Restoration, burst on the servants of the Company. The humane 
man was horror-struck at the way in which they had got their 
money, the thrifty man at the way in which they spent it. The 
Dilettante sneered at their want of taste. The Macaroni* black- 
balled them as vulgar fellows. Writers the most unlike in senti- 
ment and style, Methodists and libertines, philosophers and buf- 
foons, were for once on the same side. It is hardly too much to 
say that, during a space of about thirty years, the whole lighter 
literature of England was colored by the feelings which we have 
described. Foote brought on the stage an Anglo-Indian chief, 
dissolute, ungenerous, and tyrannical, ashamed of the humble 
friends of his youth, hating the aristocracy, yet childishly eager 
to be numbered among them, squandering his wealth on panders 
and flatterers, tricking out his chairmen^ with the most costly 

1 Domesday Book : a survey and census of England completed by William the 
Conqueror in 1086. 

2 Turcaret: a character in Le Sage's comedy of " Turcaret " ; a ' n ignorant, 
ill-mannered, and purse-proud through suddenly acquired wealth. 

3 Monsieur Jourdain: the hero of Mohere's comedy, "Le Bourgeois Gentil- 
homme " ; a retired tradesman with much money and few brains, who makes him- 
self ridiculous by his attempts to buy culture and accomplishments. 

4 Macaroni : London " swells " and fops of the eighteenth century. 

5 Chairmen : the men who carried a sedan-chair. These chairs, theri in 
common use, were the predecessors of the modern cabs. 



LORD CLIVE. 75 

hot-house flowers, and astounding the ignorant with jargon about 
rupees, lacs, and jaghires. Mackenzie, with more deUcate humor, 
depicted a plain country family raised by the Indian acquisitions 
of one of its members to sudden opulence, and exciting deriaion 
by an awkward mimicry of the manners of the great. Cowper in 
that lofty expostulation^ which glows with the very spirit of the 
Hebrew poets, placed the oppression of India foremost in the list 
of those national crimes for which God had punished England 
with years of disastrous war, with discomfiture in her own seas, and 
with the loss of her transatlantic empire. If any of our readers 
will take the trouble to search in the dusty recesses of circulating 
libraries for some novel pubhshed sixty years ago, the chance is 
that the villain or sub-villain of the story will prove to be a savage 
old Nabob, with an immense fortune, a tawny complexion, a bad 
liver, and a worse heart. 

Such, as far as we can now judge, was the feehng of the country 
respecting Nabobs in general. And Clive was eminently the 
Nabob, the ablest, the most celebrated, the highest in rank, the 
highest in fortune, of all the fraternity. His wealth was exhibited 
in a manner which could not fail to excite odium. He lived with 
great magnificence in Berkeley Square.^ He reared one place in 
Shropshire^ and another at Claremont.* His parliamentary influ- 
ence might vie with that of the greatest families. But in all this 
splendor and power envy found something to sneer at. On some 
of his relations wealth and dignity seem to have sat as awkwardly 
as on Mackenzie's Margery Mushroom.^ Nor was he himself, 
with all his great qualities, free from those weaknesses which ihe 
satirists of that age represented as characteristic of his whole 
class. In the field, indeed, his habits were remarkably simple. 

1 Expos'i': ation: see Cowper's poem "Expostulation," especially lines 364- 
375- [J-J G.] 

2 Berlt«Iey Square : an aristocratic square at the West End, London. 

3 Shropshire : near Market Drayton, in Shropshire. 

* Claremont : in Surrey, about fifteen miles from London. 

5 Margery Mushroom : an assumed name under which Mackenzie wrote in 
a serial entitled " The Lounger." The character is sufficiently indicated by the 
name. [J. F. G.] 



76 LORD CLIVE. 

He was constantly on horseback, was never seen but in his uniform, 
never wore silk, never entered a palanquin, and was content with 
the plainest fare. But when he was no longer at the head of an 
army, he laid aside this Spartan temperance for the ostentatious 
luxury of a Sybarite. Though his person was ungraceful, and 
though his harsh features were redeemed from vulgar ugliness only 
by their stern, dauntless, and commanding expression, he was 
fond of rich and gay clothing, and replenished his wardrobe with 
absurd profusion. Sir John Malcolm gives us a letter worthy of 
Sir Matthew Mite,^ in which Clive orders " two hundred shirts, the 
best and finest that can be got for love or money." A few folhes 
of this description, grossly exaggerated by report, produced an 
unfavorable impression on the public mind. But this was not 
the worst. Black stories, of which the greater part were pure 
inventions, were circulated touching his conduct in the East. He 
had to bear the whole odium, not only of those bad acts to which 
he had once or twice stooped, but of all the bad acts of all the 
English in India, of bad acts committed when he was absent, nay, 
of bad acts which he had manfully opposed and severely punished. 
The very abuses against which he had waged an honest, resolute, 
and successful war, were laid to his account. He was, in fact, 
regarded as the personification of all the vices and weaknesses 
which the public, with or without reason, ascribed to the English 
adventurers in Asia. We have ourselves heard old men, who 
knew nothing of his history, but who still retained the prejudices 
conceived in their youth, talk of him as an incarnate fiend. John- 
son always held this language. Brown, whom Clive employed to 
lay out his pleasure grounds, was amazed to see in the house of 
his noble employer a chest which had once been filled with gold 
from the treasury of Moorshedabad, and could not understand 
how the conscience of the criminal could suffer him to sleep with 
such an object so near to his bed-chamber. The peasantry of. 
Surrey looked with mysterious horror on the stately house which 

1 Sir Matthew Mite: a noted character — a returned East-India merchant — in 
Foote's play of the " Nabob." In his essay on " History " Macaulay refers to him 
as having made a large but useless collection of turnpike tickets. [ J. F. G.] 



LORD CLIVE. 77 

was rising at Claremont, and whispered that the great wicked lord 
had ordered the walls to be made so thick in order to keep out 
the devil, who would one day carry him away bodily. Among 
the gaping clowns who drank in this frightful story was a worthless 
ugly lad of the name of Hunt, since widely known as William 
Huntington, S. S.^ ; and the superstition which was strangely 
mingled with the knavery of that remarkable impostor seems to 
have derived no small nutriment from the tales which he heard of 
the life and character cf Clive. 

In the mean time, the impulse which Clive had given to the 
administration of Bengal was constantly becoming fainter and 
fainter. His policy was to a great extent abandoned ; the abuses 
which he had suppressed began to revive ; and at length the evils 
which a bad government had engendered were aggravated by one 
of those fearful visitations which the best government cannot avert. 
In the summer of 1770, the rains failed; the earth was parched 
up ; the tanks were empty ; the rivers shrank within their beds ; 
and a famine, such as is known only in countries where every 
household depends for support on its own little patch of cultiva- 
tion, filled the whole valley of the Ganges with misery and death. 
Tender and delicate women, whose veils had never been lifted 
before the public gaze, came forth from the inner chambers in 
which Eastern jealousy had kept watch over their beauty, threw 
themselves on the earth before the passers-by, and, with loud 
wailing, implored a handful of rice for their children. The Hoog- 
ley every day rolled down thousands of corpses close to the por- 
ticos and gardens of the English conquerors. The very streets of 
Calcutta were blocked up by the dying and the dead. The lean 
and feeble survivors had not energy enough to bear the bodies of 
their kindred to the funeral pile or the holy river, or even to scare 
away the jackals and vultures, that fed on human remains in the 
'face of day. The extent of the mortality was never ascertained ; 
but it was popularly reckoned by millions. This melancholy intel- 

1 William Huntington, S. S. : an eccentric character, half genius and half 
charlatan. He became a Methodist minister, and gave himself the title of S. S., or 
Sinner Saved. 



78 LORD CLIVE. 

ligence added to the excitement which already prevailed in Eng> 
land on Indian subjects. The proprietors of East India stock 
were uneasy about their dividends. All men of common humanity 
were touched by the calamities of our unhappy subjects; and 
indignation soon began to mingle itself with pity. It was rumored 
that the Company's servants had created the famine by engrossing 
all the rice of the country ; that they had sold grain for eight, ten, 
twelve times the price at which they had bought itj that one Eng- 
lish functionary who, the year before, was not worth a hundred 
guineas, had, during that season of misery, remitted sixty thousand 
pounds to London. These charges we beheve to have been un- 
founded. That servants of the Company had ventured, since 
Clive's departure, to deal in rice, is probable. That, if they dealt 
in rice, they must have gained by the scarcity, is certain. But 
there is no reason for thinking that they either produced or 
aggravated an evil which physical causes sufficiently explain. The 
outcry which was raised against them on this occasion was, we 
suspect, as absurd as the imputations which, in times of dearth at 
home, were once thrown by statesmen and judges, and are still 
thrown by two or three old women, on the corn-factors. It was, 
however, so loud and so general that it appears to have imposed 
even on an intellect raised so high above vulgar prejudices as that 
of Adam Smith. ^ What was still more extraordinary, these unhappyJ 
events greatly increased the unpopularity of Lord Clive. He had - 
been some years in England when the famine took place. None 
of his acts had the smallest tendency to produce such a calamity. 
If the servants of the company had traded in rice, they had done 
so in direct contravention of the rule which he had laid down, and, 
while in power, had resolutely enforced. But, in the eyes of his 
countrymen, he was, as we have said, the Nabob, the Anglo-Indian 
character personified ; and, while he was building and planting in 
Surrey, he was held responsible for all the effects of a dry season 
in Bengal. 

ParHament had hitherto bestowed very little attention on our 

1 Adam Smith: see " Wealth of Nations," Book IV. chap. V., Digression on 
the Corn Laws. 



LORD CLIVE. 79 

Eastern possessions. Since the death of George the Second, a 
rapid succession of weak administrations, each of which was in 
turn flattered and betrayed by the Court, had held the semblance 
of power. Intrigues in the palace, riots in the capital, and insur- 
rectionary movements in the American colonies, had left the 
advisers of the crown little leisure to study Indian politics. When 
they did interfere, their interference was feeble and irresolute. 
Lord Chatham indeed, during the short period of his ascendency 
in the councils of George the Third, had meditated a bold attack 
on the Company. But his plans were rendered abortive by the 
strange malady which about that time began to overcloud his 
splendid genius. 

At length, in 1772, it was generally felt that Parliament could 
no longer neglect the affairs of India. The Government was 
stronger than any which had held power since the breach between 
Mr. Pitt and the great Whig connection in 1761. No pressing 
question of domestic or European poUcy required the attention 
of public men. There was a short and delusive lull between two 
tempests. The excitement produced by the Middlesex election' 
was over ; the discontents of America did not yet threaten civil 
war ; financial difficulties of the Company brought on a crisis ; 
the Ministers were forced to take up the subject ; and the whole 
storm, which had long been gathering, now broke at once on the 
head of Clive. 

His situation was indeed singularly unfortunate. He was hated 
throughout the country, hated at the India House, hated, above 
all, by those wealthy and powerful servants of the Company, 
whose rapacity and tyranny he had withstood. He had to bear 
the double odium of his bad and of his good actions, of every 
Indian abuse and of every Indian reform. The state of the poHt- 
ical world was such that he could count on the support of no 

1 Middlesex Election : in 1769 the notorious Jolin Wilkes was elected to the 
House of Commons by the county of Middlesex. The House refused to receive 
him ; the Middlesex electors insisted that they had the constitutional right to send a 
member of their choice to Parliament. After a hot struggle the House finally con- 
ceded the right, thus establishing a principle of the highest importance. 



80 LORD CLIVE. 

powerful connection. The party to which he had belonged, tha,t 
of George Grenville, had been hostile to the Government, and yet 
had never cordially united with the other sections of the Oppo- 
sition, with the httle band which still followed the fortunes of Lord 
Chatham, or with the large and respectable body of which Lord 
Rockingham was the acknowledged leader. George Grenville was 
now dead : his followers were scattered ; and Clive, unconnected 
with any of the powerful factions which divided the Parliament, 
could reckon only on the votes of those members who were re- 
turned by himself. His enemies, particularly those who were the 
enemies of his virtues, were unscrupulous, ferocious, implacable. 
Their malevolence aimed at nothing less than the utter ruin of his 
fame and fortune. They wished to see him expelled from Parha- 
ment, to see his spurs chopped off,^ to see his estate confiscated ; 
and it may be doubted whether even such a result as this would 
have quenched their thirst for revenge. 

Clive's parliamentary tactics resembled his military tactics. 
Deserted, surrounded, outnumbered, and with everything at stake, 
he did not even deign to stand on the defensive, but pushed 
boldly forward to the attack. At an early stage of the discussions 
on Indian affairs he rose, and in a long and elaborate speech vin- 
dicated himself from a large part of the accusations which had 
been brought against him. He is said to have produced a great 
impression on his audience. Lord Chatham, who, now the ghost 
of his former self, loved to haunt the scene of his glory, was that 
night under the gallery of the House of Commons, and declared 
that he had never heard a finer speech. It was subsequently 
printed under Clive's direction, and, when the fullest allowance 
has been made for the assistance which he may have obtained 
from literary friends, proves him to have possessed, not merely 
strong sense and manly spirit, but talents both for disquisition and 
declamation which assiduous culture might have improved into 
the highest excellence. He confined his defence on this occasion 

1 Spurs chopped off : Clive had been created a Knight of the Bath ; to chop 
off his spurs, the insignia of knighthood, was to degrade and expel him from the 
order. 



LORD CLIVE. 81 

to the measures of his last administration, and succeeded so far 
that his enemies thenceforth thought it expedient to direct their 
attacks chiefly against the earher part of his Ufe. 

The earlier part of his hfe unfortunately presented some assail- 
able points to their hostility. A committee was chosen by ballot 
to inquire into the affairs of India ; and by this committee the 
whole history of that great revolution which threw down Surajah 
Dowlah and raised Meer Jafifier was sifted with malignant care. 
Clive was subjected to the most unsparing examination and cross- 
examination, and afterwards bitterly complained that he, the 
Baron of Plassey, had been treated like a sheep-stealer. The 
boldness and ingenuousness of his replies would alone suffice to 
show how alien from his nature were the frauds to which, in the 
course of his Eastern negotiations, he had sometimes descended. 
He avowed the arts which he had employed to deceive Omi- 
chund, and resolutely said that he was not ashamed of them, and 
that, in the same circumstances, he would again act in the same 
manner. He admitted that he had received immense sums from 
Meer Jafifier ; but he denied that, in doing so, he had violated 
any obligation of morality or honor. He laid claim, on the con- 
trary, and not without some reason, to the praise of eminent dis- 
interestedness. He described in vivid language the situation in 
which his victory had placed him ; great princes dependent on 
his pleasure ; an opulent city afraid of being given up to plunder ; 
wealthy bankers bidding against each other for his smiles ; vaults 
piled with gold and jewels thrown open to him alone. " By God, 
Mr. Chairman," he exclaimed, " at this moment I stand astonished 
at my own moderation." 

The inquiry was so extensive that the House rose before it had 
been completed. It was continued in the following session. 
When at length the committee had concluded its labors, enlight- 
ened and impartial men had little difficulty in making up their 
minds as to the result. It was clear that Clive had been guilty of 
some acts which it is impossible to vindicate without attacking the 
authority of all the most sacred laws which regulate the inter- 
course of individuals and of states. But it was equally clear that 



82 LORD CLIVE. 

he had displayed great talents, and even great virtues ; that he 
had rendered eminent services both to his country and to the 
people of India ; and that it was in truth not for his dealings with 
Meer Jaffier, nor for the fraud which he had practised on Omi- 
chund, but for his determined resistance to avarice and tyranny, 
that he was now called in question. 

Ordinary criminal justice knows nothing of set-off. The great- 
est desert cannot be pleaded in answer to a charge of the slightest 
transgression. If a man has sold beer on Sunday morning, it is 
no defence that he has saved the life of a fellow-cre' '-ire at the 
risk of his own. If he has harnessed a Newfoundland dog to his 
little child's carriage, it is no defence that he was wounded at 
Waterloo. But it is not in this way that we ought to deal with 
men who, raised far above ordinary restraints, and tried by far 
more than ordinary temptations, are entitled to a more than or- 
dinary measure of indulgence. Such men should be judged by 
their contemporaries as they will be judged by posterity. Their 
bad actions ought not indeed to be called good : but their good 
and bad actions ought to be fairly weighed ; and if on the whole 
the good preponderate, the sentence ought to be one, not merely 
of acquittal, but of approbation. Not a single great ruler in his- 
tory can be absolved by a judge who fixes his eye inexorably on 
one or two unjustifiable acts. Bruce the deliverer of Scotland, 
Maurice the deliverer of Germany, Wilhara the deliverer of 
Holland, his great descendant the deliverer of England,^ Murray the 
good regent, Cosmo ^ the father of his country, Henry the Fourth 
of France, Peter the Great of Russia, how would the best of them 
pass such a scrutiny ? History takes wider views ; and the best 
tribunal for great political cases is the tribunal which anticipates 
the verdict of history. 

Reasonable and moderate men of all parties felt this in Clive's 
case. They could not pronounce him blameless ; but they were 
not disposed to abandon him to that low-minded and rancorous 

1 The deliverer of England: M^'ilHam III. who became king by the Revolu- 
tion of 1688, which drove James II. from the throne. 

2 Cosmo : Cosmo de Medici (the elder). 



LORD CLIVE. S3 

pack who had run him down and were eager to worry him to 
death. Lord North, though not very friendly to him, was not 
disposed to go to extremities against him. While the inquiry was 
still in progress, Clive, who had some years before been created 
a Knight of the Bath, was installed with great pomp in Henry the 
Seventh's Chapel.^ He was soon after appointed Lord Lieutenant 
of Shropshire. When he kissed hands,^ George the Third, who 
had always been partial to him, admitted him to a private audi- 
ence, talked to him half an hour on Indian politics, and was visibly 
affected w^-^n the persecuted general spoke of his services and of 
the way in which they had been requited. 

At length the charges came in a definite form before the House 
of Commons. Burgoyne,^ chairman of the committee, a man of 
wit, fashion, and honor, an agreeable dramatic writer, an officer 
whose courage was never questioned, and whose skill was at that 
time highly esteemed, appeared as the accuser. The members of 
the administration took different sides ; for in that age all ques- 
tions were open questions, except such as were brought forward 
by the Government, or such as imphed some censure on the Gov- 
ernment. Thurlow, the Attorney General, was among the assail- 
ants. Wedderburne, the Solicitor General, strongly attached to 
Clive, defended his friend with extraordinary force of argument 
and language. It is a curious circumstance that, some years later, 
Thurlow was the most conspicuous champion of Warren Hastings', 
while Wedderburne was among the most unrelenting persecutors 
of that great though not faultless statesman. Clive spoke in his 
own defence, at less length and with less art than in the preceding 
year, with much energy and pathos. He recounted his great 
actions and his wrongs : and, after bidding his hearers remember, 
that they were about to decide not only on his honor but their 
own, he retired from the House. 

1 Henry the Seventh's Chapel : part of Westminster Abbey. 

2 Kissed hands : i.e., kissed the king's hands on taking office. 

3 Burgoyne : this was that General Burgoyne who figured so conspicuously and 
disastrously at the battle of Saratoga in the American Revolution. He made a 
violent attack on Clive, and proposed the principle afterward adopted, that the 
East India Company should be placed under the control of Parliament. 



84 LORD CLIVE. 

The Commons resolved that acquisitions made by the arms of 
the State belong to the State alone, and that it is illegal in the 
servants of the State to appropriate such acquisitions to them- 
selves. They resolved that this wholesome rule appeared to have 
been systematically violated by the EngUsh functionaries in Bengal. 
On a subsequent day they went a step farther, and resolved that 
Clive had, by means of the power which he possessed as com- 
mander of the British forces in India, obtained large sums from 
Meer Jafifier. Here the Commons stopped. They had voted the 
major and minor of Burgoyne's syllogism ; ^ but they shrank from 
^drawing the logical conclusion. When it was moved that Lord 
Clive had abused his powers, and set an evil example to the ser- 
vants of the public, the previous question was put and carried. 
At length, long after the sun had risen on an animated debate, 
VVedderburne moved that Lord Clive had at the same time ren- 
dered great and meritorious services to his country ; and this 
motion passed without a division. 

The result of this memorable inquiry appears to us, on the 
whole, honorable to the justice, moderation, and discernment of 
the Commons. They had indeed no great temptation to do 
wrong. They would have been very bad judges of an accusation 
brought against Jenkinson or against Wilkes. But the question 
respecting Clive was not a party question ; and the House accord- 
iiigly acted with the good sense and good feeling which may 
always be expected from an assembly of English gentlemen not 
blinded by faction. 

The equitable and temperate proceedings of the British Parlia- 
ment were set off to the greatest advantage by a foil. The 
wretched government of Lewis the Fifteenth had murdered, 
directly or indirectly, almost every Frenchman who had served his 

1 The major and minor of Burgoyne's syllogism : Macaulay was fond of 
analyzing measures and arguments, especially such as he was refuting, by the 
formal terms of logic. Here the syllogism is:- Major premise — it is illegal in the 
servants of the State to appropriate to themselves acquisitions made by the arms of 
the State (resolve voted) ; minor premise — Clive has, by the arms of England, 
obtained large sums from Meer Jaffier (resolve voted); conclusion — hence, — 
but the conclusion was evaded by moving the previous question. [ J. F. G.] 



LORD CLIVE. 85 

country with distinction in tiie East. Labourdonnais was flung 
into the Bastile, and after years of suffering left it only to die. 
Dupleix, stripped of his immense fortune, and broken-hearted by 
humiliating attendance in ante-chambers, sank into an obscure 
grave. Lally was dragged to the common place of execution with 
a gag between his lips. The Commons of England, on the other 
hand, treated their living captain with that discriminating justice 
which is seldom shown except to the dead. They laid down 
sound general principles ; they delicately pointed out where he 
had deviated from those principles ; and they tempered the gentle 
censure with liberal eulogy. The contrast struck Voltaire, always 
partial to England, and always eager to expose the abuses of the 
Parhaments of France. Indeed he seems, at this time, to have 
meditated a history of the conquest of Bengal. He mentioned his 
design to Dr. Moore when that amusing writer visited him at 
Ferney. Wedderburne took great interest in the matter, and 
pressed Clive to furnish materials. Had the plan been carried 
into execution, we have no doubt that Voltaire would have pro- 
duced a book containing ^ much lively and picturesque narrative, 
many just and humane sentiments poignantly expressed, many 
grotesque blunders, many sneers at the Mosaic chronology, much 
scandal about the Catholic missionaries, and much sublime theo- 
philanthropy, stolen from the New Testament, and put into the 
mouths of virtuous and philosophical Brahmins. 

Clive was now secure in the enjoyment of his fortune and his 
honors. He was surrounded by attached friends and relations ; 
and he had not yet passed the season of vigorous bodily and 
mental exertion. But clouds had long been gathering over his 
mind, and now settled on it in thick darkness. 'From early youth 
he had been subject to fits of that strange melancholy "which 
rejoiceth exceedingly and is glad when it can find the grave." ^ 
While still a writer at Madras, he had twice attempted to destroy 
himself. Business and prosperity had produced a salutary effect 

1 Containing', etc. : the following are characteristics of Voltaire's general style, 
which Macaulay here takes occasion delicately to satirize. [ J. F. G.] 

2 See Job iii. 22. 



86 LORD CLIVE. 

on his spirits. In India, wliile he was occupied by great affairs, 
in England, while wealth and rank had still the charm of novelty, 
he had borne up against his constitutional misery ; but he had 
now nothing to do and nothing to wish for. His active spirit in 
an inactive situation drooped and withered like a plant in an un- 
congenial air. The malignity with which his enemies had pursued 
him, the indignity with which he had been treated by the com- 
mittee, the censure, lenient as it was, which the House of Commons 
had pronounced, the knowledge that he was regarded by a large 
portion of his countrymen as a cruel and perfidious tyrant, all con- 
curred to irritate and depress him. In the mean time his temper 
was tried by acute physical suffering. During his long residence 
in tropical climates, he had contracted several painful distempers. 
In order to obtain ease he called in the help of opium ; and he 
was gradually enslaved by this treacherous ally. To the last, how- 
ever, his genius occasionally flashed through the gloom. It was 
said that he would sometimes, after sitting silent and torpid for 
hours, rouse himself to the discussion of some great question, 
would display in full vigor all the talents of the soldier and 
the statesman, and would then sink back into his melancholy 
repose. 

The disputes with America had now become so serious that an 
appeal to the sword seemed inevitable ; and the Ministers were 
desirous to avail themselves of the services of Clive. Had he still 
been what he was when he raised the siege of Patna, and annihi- 
lated the Dutch army and navy at the mouth of the Ganges, it is 
not improbable that the resistance of the Colonists would have 
been put down, and that the inevitable separation would have been 
deferred for a few years. But it was too late. His strong mind 
was fast sinking under many kinds of suffering. On the twenty- 
second of November, 1 7 74, he died by his own hand. He had 
just completed his forty-ninth year. 

In the awful close of so much prosperity and glory, the vulgar 
saw only a confirmation of all their prejudices ; and some men of 
real piety and genius so far forgot the maxims both of religion and 
of philosophy as confidently to ascribe the mournful event to the 



LORD CLIVE. S7 

just vengeance of God, and to the horrors of an evil conscience. 
It is with very different feelings that we contemplate the spec- 
tacle of a great mind ruined by the weariness of satiety, by 
the pangs of wounded honor, by fatal diseases, and more fatal 
remedies. 

Clive committed great faults ; and we have not attempted to 
disguise them. But his faults, when weighed against his merits, 
and viewed in connection with his temptations, do not appear to 
us to deprive him of his right to an honorable place in the estima- 
tion of posterity. 

From his first visit to India dates the renown of the Enghsh 
arms in the East. Till he appeared, his countrymen were despised 
as mere pedlers, while the French were revered as people formed 
for victory and command. His courage and capacity dissolved 
the charm. With the defence of Arcot commences that long 
series of Oriental triumphs which closes with the fall of Ghizni.^ 
Nor must we forget that he was only twenty-five years old when 
he approved himself ripe for military command. This is a rare 
if not a singular distinction. It is true that Alexander, Condd, 
and Charles the Twelfth won great battles at a still earlier age ; 
but those princes were surrounded by veteran generals of distin- 
guished skill, to whose suggestions must be attributed the victories 
of the Granicus, of Rocroi, and of Narva. Clive, an inexperi- 
enced youth, had yet more experience than any of those who 
served under him. He had to form himself, to form his officers, 
and to form his army. The only man, as far as we recollect, who 
at an equally early age ever gave equal proof of' talents for war, 
was Napoleon Bonaparte. 

From Clive's second visit to India dates the political ascendency 
of the English in that country. His dexterity and resolution real- 
ized, in the course of a few months, more than all the gorgeous 

^ Ghizni : a town of Afghanistan ; it was stormed and taken by the English in 
1839, not long before Macaulay finished this essay. The object of the English in 
the Afghan War was to maintain Afghanistan as a barrier between Russia and 
India. The Afghan monarchy, though nominally independent, owes its power, in 
large measure, to its recognition by the British government. 



88 LORD CLIVE. 

visions which had floated before the imagination of Dupleix. Such 
an extent of cultivated territory, such an amount of revenue, such 
a multitude of subjects, was never added to the dominion of Rome 
by the most successful proconsul. Nor were such wealthy spoils 
ever borne under arches of triumph, down the Sacred Way, and 
through the crowded Forum, to the threshold of Tarpeian Jove. 
The fame of those who subdued Antiochus and Tigranes grows 
dim when compared with the splendor of the exploits which the 
young English adventurer achieved at the head of an army not 
equal in numbers to one-half of a Roman legion. 

From Clive's third visit to India dates the purity of our Eastern 
empire. AVhen he landed in Calcutta in 1765, Bengal was re- 
garded as a place to which Englishmen were sent only to get rich, 
by any means, in the shortest possible time. He first made daunt- 
less and unsparing war on that gigantic system of oppression, ex- 
tortion, and corruption. In that war he manfully put to hazard 
his ease, his fame, and his splendid fortune. The same sense of 
justice which forbids us to conceal or extenuate the faults of his 
earlier days compels us to admit that those faults were nobly 
repaired. If the reproach of the Company and of its servants 
has been taken away, if in India the yoke of foreign masters, 
elsewhere the heaviest of all yokes, has been found hghter than 
that of any native dynasty, if to that gang of public robbers, which 
formerly spread terror through the whole plain of Bengal, has suc- 
ceeded a body of functionaries not more highly distinguished by 
ability and dihgence than by integrity, disinterestedness, and public 
spirit, if we now see such men as Munro, Elphinstone, and Met- 
calfe, after leading victorious armies, after making and deposing 
kings, return, proud of their honorable poverty, from a land which 
once held out to every greedy factor the hope of boundless wealth, 
the praise is in no small measure due to Clive. His name stands 
high on the roll of conquerors. But it is found in a better list, in 
the list of those who have done and suffered much for the happi- 
ness of mankind. To the warrior, history will assign a place in 
the same rank with LucuUus and Trajan. Nor will she deny to 
the reformer a share of that veneration with which France cher- 



LORD CLIVE. 89 

ished the memory of Turgot, and with which the latest genera- 
tions of Hindoos will contemplate the statue of Lord William 
Bentinck.^ 

^ Bentinck : Lord William Bentinck, governor-general of India (1828-1835), 
was in office when Macaulay began his work in India as one of the members of 
the Supreme Council. A bronze statue in Calcutta, commemorating Lord Bent- 
inck's administration, bears an inscription written by Macaulay, in which the his- 
torian justly affirms of that eminent statesman that he " never forgot that the end 
of government is the welfare of the governed." 

In fact, Lord Bentinck took the first decided step toward the inauguration of 
the policy, now firmly established by the British crown, which endeavors to rule 
India in the interests of India. 

Since the dissolution of the Company in 1858 the progress made in that empire 
has been immense. To-day nearly twenty thousand miles of railway, supplemented 
by over thirty thousand miles of telegraph lines, connect the chief cities of India 
with each other. Steamboats ply on the principal rivers, and vast systems of roads 
and canals, built by the government, have greatly extended trade and commerce. 
This material advance has been accompanied by a steady increase in educational 
interest, and there are now over one hundred and thirty thousand public schools in 
India in addition to three universities and many normal schools and colleges. The 
latest statistics show that there are also more than three hundred newspapers in 
regular circulation, and that about nine thousand books and other publications are 
issued annually. 



